About once a month, I slink out of my front door, shamefaced and secretive, like someone on their way to visit a strip bar, and I show up at a friend’s address. There, we sit around a table and earnestly arrange small wooden pieces. We shuffle shiny cards dense with type. We lay out elaborate cardboard tiles that fit together like puzzle pieces. For three or four hours straight, we play a board game called The Settlers of Catan.
It pains me to confess it – I feel about a million years old – but in our strange and straitened times, post-Covid, mid-economic crisis and with winter imminent, these gentle nights in have become some of my favourite nights out. I look forward to plonking myself down at a kitchen table to play a marathon game of The Settlers of Catan like I used to look forward to restaurant steaks, sweaty gigs and late-night bar crawls.
“Play” is maybe the wrong word. “Play” doesn’t capture the totality of our investment. There are half a dozen people who show up at Catan club, five men and one woman, and for the duration of any contest we turn into savages, betraying one another, abandoning promises, occasionally cackling.
The game was devised in Germany in the 1990s and it shares elements with Monopoly and Risk, as well as the children’s card game Go Fish, vintage video games such as Civilization and Theme Park, and the parlour game Wink Murder. You are given plots of land in an imaginary pre-industrial world called Catan. Natural advantages are not evenly distributed. But you do what you can to bleed the land, build towns and trading routes, form a militia, prevent property thefts, and talk your way out of mob justice that can be as cruel and arbitrary as any episode-ending betrayal in Game of Thrones.
After initial experiments with other board games, we tried The Settlers of Catan and never looked back. In my experience, while playing, you feel no ickiness or embarrassment whatsoever. You only lust after more supplies, another favourable dice roll, a longer road, a slightly bigger army … But before and after board-games club, I do feel a distinct, queasy melancholy. I find I’m reluctant to meet the eyes of younger night-outers on the train. I turned 40 this year. If you’d told me at 30 this was how I would be socialising in a decade’s time I would have been … surprised? Appalled? For sure I would have been curious to know what the hell had happened to my social life as I knew it.
The pandemic of 2020 pulled us all up. There was a halt (professional, emotional, educational, physiological, social) and afterwards, perspectives changed. By 2021 I should have been more broke than I was in 2019. But that wasn’t the case for me. Despite a downtick in work, the bank balance remained even, and I realised then how just much cash I’d been tossing away on pizzas, pints, coffees, trains, Ubers, childcare, restaurants – paying, in other words, to go on playing the wonderful game of socialising in a British city.
Trapped at home like everybody else during the lockdowns, I had exactly one social commitment. It was a midweek game of poker, played online against the same few friends, all of us hunched in front of our computers, holding supermarket beers and chuntering about bad luck. Poker entry: £20. Beers: £5. Chuntering: free. After a few months of this, I could hardly imagine having fun any other way.
Out the other side of the pandemic, it no longer seemed so strange to pass an evening clustered around a table, rolling dice, quarrelling over the import price of Catanese wool. Last summer, a few of us from board-games club tried returning to a nightclub we hadn’t visited since before Covid. It wasn’t that I had a bad time, more that I struggled with how close we all stood. Thousands of strangers, hip to hip, standing on each other’s toes! I realised then that something had probably changed in my brain and body in 2020: the proximity alarms had been rewired, the eardrums denuded, and certain anxieties much closer to the surface.
So, Catan club. We started coming together around a board because one of our number was unwell after a bout of long Covid. But all of us quickly came to appreciate the restorative effects of socialising that was sober(ish) and, though not always quiet, at least always stationary. Cheap, too.
The picture on the Settlers of Catan box sometimes catches my eye. It shows a yellow sun shining on two sweating farmers who have set down their tools and hay bales to rest on a rock. One is holding out a conciliatory hand to the other, as if to say: “Look, this may not be what we imagined for ourselves. But it’s a pure, honest, simple pursuit – and definitely more financially prudent than paying a three-figure bill in a mediocre restaurant just because the proprietor was once on MasterChef.”
Recently, in a lull between gatherings, I tried to gauge everyone else’s level of embarrassment or contentment about our new way of hanging out. I asked them all to imagine what their younger selves would say if dragged out of some filthy and thrilling club in the 2000s and shown a glimpse of the future: with all of us sitting round and frowning in concentration around The Settlers of Catan, the success of our evening about to turn on whether someone had collected enough brick-factory tokens.
What would our younger selves have felt? “Disgust,” someone suggested. “Relief,” said another. One part disgust to one part relief? That ratio seems about right. Anyway, I find myself looking forward to our next game. I hope I can bale enough hay.
Steady on! Six more fun - but gentle - nights in
Listening party
If you love music, listening parties are excellent: gather friends, pour some drinks, provide snacks – and invite everyone to play a track of their choice. The idea is to listen closely in silence, then chat about it afterwards. Alternatively, come together for a first play of a new album.
Film night
If you use streaming platforms, watch parties are an option, although, technically, you’re not even required to be in the same room to enjoy these with friends. Instead, all agree a time to start a new movie or box set and use the watch-together function on the big streamers, such as GroupWatch on Disney+, Prime Video Watch Party or the Teleparty app, compatible with Netflix, to group chat and debrief as you go.
Games night
There are masses of new games and reimagined classics out there. In Pandemic (sorry!), four new diseases have broken out in the world and it’s up to you to save humankind: it’s a brain-stretcher.
Exploding Kittens is a fun card game, perfect for parties when drinks are flowing. For a gentle night, Codenames is an easy but addictive spymaster game, while Love Letter is a card game with a medieval vibe and a hint of poker face required. Try also: Ted Lasso, a feelgood game based on the TV show; Poetry for Neanderthals for silly fun; and Spontuneous for the musically inclined.
Cocktail party
My friends like to ditch the trains, taxis and expense and bring the bar to the sofa instead. TikTok is awash with #bartender cocktail recipes, and letterbox cocktail-making kits haven’t gone away since lockdown. Have a competition and rate your friends’ signature mixes or choose a theme or a movie to inspire the evening’s cocktail menu. Award extra points for using household objects for a themed presentation.
Pot-luck dinner
If you want to dine with friends, pool the food as well as the booze with a pot-luck dinner party, cooking a dish each. If you all live close to one another, how about an old-school progressive dinner party, walking from house to house for each course?
Pasta-making
Feed me pasta every day and I would be a happy woman. The homemade variety looks tricky to make, but if you’ve always wanted to try it, you could rent the equipment for a few pounds via local message boards or invest in it as a group (machines start from £10). Split the cost of quality ingredients, make a giant mess, achieve something new and eat well, all in the comfort of your kitchen. It works with noodles and dumplings, too.
Deborah Linton
Photographer’s assistant: Toby Nima. Prop styling: Lisa at Propped Up. Clothes styling: Roz Donoghue. Hair and make-up: Neusa Neves at Arlington. Models: Taylor Spencer at Body London and Jamal G at Nevs. Pink slipper: Laines London. Sweatshirt and joggers: Zara. White T-shirt: Samsoe. Jeans: Levi’s. Navy slipper: John Lewis. Blue leggings: Otti. Cream sweatshirt: Filippa K. Pink T-shirt: American Vintage. Grey joggers and yellow top: Admiral Sporting Goods Co. Jeans: Weekday.
