Had people round today, which was quite fun. Was meant to be a picnic, but since weather didn't look promising when I got up I said I'd make some lunch here and we had quite a good time, though I managed to make way to much food. Oh well, leftovers for dinner tonight, and lunch and dinner tomorrow I think :-) We played Uno, only Will had played recently with people who had all these new rules, like if anyone plays a 9 you all have to slam your hands onto the pile, last to do so has to pick up 2, and if anyone says "sorry" at any point in the game they have to pick up 2. The new rule that made it the most complicated was that you could play an identical card at any point in the game regardless of who's go it is and then play continues from you, so game play gets really fast and keeps jumping about all over the place. One thing I just discovered by looking for a site with the Uno rules is that it's meant to be the person that gets 500 points that wins, and you score points by losing all your cards, we don't do that, no one I know does, we all play that at the end of each hand everyone adds up the score of their cards and that's their score, so the winner of a hand scores 0. The loser is the one to get to 500 first. Guess it doesn't really matter either way, the object of the game is still the same. Aah, I've just found that what we all do is challenge Uno. Oh, one of the other diabolical new rules which led to me picking up 16 cards in one go and 12 in another is the if someone has played a +2 or +4 the next person doesn't have to pick up if they have a matching card (not identical, just +2 on a +2 or +4 on a +4) with the added, you can play an identical card at any point, it can end up with everyone piling on all their +4s at once and leaving the poor last person, often me, to pick up however many times 2 or 4, evil! I don't know why this obsession with Uno seems to have started up recently in various groups of people that I know, I know some people who get together and play Uno till 2am. I remember we used to play it when I was a kid, I don't know why there's been this sudden revival in the game. I guess it's quite addictive, I know I had fun, plus it's slightly less violent than spoons,* which is the other card game we used to play a lot. We used to play Mafia** loads, but I think everyone's sick of that, although it has the advantage of not needing any cards or anything.

After everyone left Will hung around, we both felt like watching a film, so we rented Road to Perdition it was alright. Nothing amazing about it, not bad, but lacking in a kind of hero figure. You didn't really empathise wholly with any character. I guess the kid was the one you were supposed to, but obviously he's not a hero, he's just a kid. It was quite good though and probably better than some of the other options that we looked at in Blockbusters.


* Whilst looking for a site showing the rules for spoons as played here in the UK I found a site showing American rules oddly the only similarity to the game we play is the name and the fact that spoons are grabbed during the game and there's one less spoon than player, other than that this game sounds oddly like Uno. In fact the site I linked to showing the version we play isn't quite the same as we don't get people out the first time they fail to get a spoon, we play that you get a letter from the word spoon each time you fail, the first one to be a spoon is out.

**I didn't realise how many different versions of Mafia there were. Couldn't find one anywhere with the rules we play, we have a doctor, who saves someone randomnly in the night, so if the mafia tried to kill that person it's only attempted murder. We don't use cards, we just write identities on scraps of paper. We change rules sometimes about whether the dead person reveals themselves. Sometimes you can have a bent policeman too (i.e. they're in the mafia, but the police think they're a policeman).