This weekend I went to Oxford to meet up with an old school friend, after going for the obligatory punt and realising we were too late to attend the Pitt Rivers Museum we went to Thirsty Meeples.
Thirsty Meeples, is a cafe/friendly gaming store. For the price of £3.50 per head (or £5 if you do not buy any food or drinks) you can rent a table and play as many of their games on offer as you want. It is quite a collection, with over 1,700 titles there ready for you to play. Also their staff were really helpful and helped us with quick explanations of rules.
The shop seemed really busy and apparently we were lucky to get a table as we did not pre-book and it was a Saturday. This seems like a great business model for game shops and I wonder if there are any other shops like this across the UK.
Whilst we were there, we played a few rounds of Skull and Roses (Hervé Marly), a game of Carcassonne (Klaus-Jürgen Wrede), and most of a game of Hanabi (Antoine Bauza) before I had to get the train back. I had not played Skull and Roses nor Hanabi before and I would definitely play them both again, both suitable for quick games with friends that are not ‘gamers’. Carcassonne is one of my favourite games, for reasons that are too long to list in this post, and I had been talking about it to my friends so they were keen to try it.
There store was well stocked and I saw a more than a few games I’ve had on my radar for a while. I limited myself to only three purchases: Skull and Roses (Hervé Marly), Cube Quest (Oliver Sibthorpe and Gary Sibthorpe) and Quantum (Eric Zimmerman). Hopefully I will not have to wait too long to play them all.
Practice Theory Play 