Arriving at Storiel, we weren’t expecting to find the whole car park fenced off, but thankfully that didn’t put people off finding us!
Over the course of the day, we welcomed probably a record number of people! A few families popped in and joined in the fun, plus one of the kids had a tiny pet tortoise with him, so cute!
We had the usual catch up time from 11-12, with chance to sign up to both the (Olympics) league and the main tournament (newly released Mario Party Jamboree)
The staff at the venue were very accommodating, and we were very grateful for the free hot drink to keep us warm.
Freeplay happened throughout the day, some people on their own individual Switches, and on the bigger screens we saw Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, some Splatoon 3, and some Fortnite
We kicked off round 1 of the league at 12pm. This event’s game was “Sport Climbing” which we thought would be simple, but everyone had to “Learn” how to play it using the motion of the joy cons. Thankfully we did have enough joy con pairs to go round, and by chance (random number generator) the 4 children were all together in one group.
The Mario Party Jamboree tournament began at about 1pm, We had a nice number of sign ups, but also more than expected, so the tournament took a little longer than anticipated. Despite the length of the tournament, everyone said it was really fun to play! John took the victory and won the big Mario Plush (which he then donated to the raffle, so it ended up with Drn!)
During the final, Freddie the tortoise ended up going for a little wander too!
After falling half an hour behind schedule (unheard of!) we had to make up some time with round 2 of the league. Round 2 is somehow themed to round 1’s Olympic choice, so today was Ice Climbers (via “Nintendo World Championships NES Edition”) – 5 levels of quite brief durations! Still one of the most frustrating games, as people were getting exasperated when they had to restart due to being out of time, or some struggling to “climb” in the first place. From the planning side, we wanted to throw in a challenging session at some point, so the penultimate session seemed entirely appropriate!
We were close to “time” then but we were able to do the Raffle (everyone who entered won something – we threw some bonus sticker sheets in too)
and finished with the group photo, which new/young member Sam took for us (Thank you, Sam!)
Thanks to all who joined us for this event. Hope the new guys enjoyed it as much as our regulars, was nice to host some faraway friends for the weekend too!
