18th Official Meet n Greet (Officially a Temporary Unofficial Event Name)

🗿💎 BOARD GAME NIGHT XVIII — GOLEM RAGE 💎🗿
“When spice traders became crystal survivors.”

Business was booming! The markets sang, the spices shimmered, and for once, no one was plotting to overthrow management. Deals were struck, debts were ignored, and Jason even reorganized the spice crates by smell. It was peace, prosperity, and pure arrogance - the kind that always comes right before someone invents something they shouldn’t.

Enter John P with an idea!

He called it The Perpetual Pepper Engine, a “revolutionary breakthrough” that would allegedly convert leftover spice dust into limitless crystal energy. The rest of us should have run. Instead, we helped. Someone held the funnel. Someone else poured in the spice. Jason—ever the optimist—declared, “We could totally make Mimosas with this!”

The explosion could be seen from Penhold Penitentiary.

When the smoke cleared, John P was gone, a perfect silhouette scorched into the sand beside a half-melted calculator. In his place, the dunes pulsed with a deep cyan glow…and then the ground began to move.

That was the moment we realized we hadn’t converted anything…. we’d woken something!!!

The dunes trembled slightly at first, a deep, rolling shudder that scattered the spice jars. Then the sands split open, geysers of color and heat tearing upwards as enormous shapes clawed their way to the surface. We watched in disbelief as the dunes themselves stood up. What we thought were hills uncurled into shoulders and fists. One blinked. Then another. Then all of them. A thousand stone faces glared down at us, each one realizing immediately that we were to blame!!

Jeff stumbled in moments later, shouting about “exclusive mining rights,” while Tim emerged from the dust, tattoos blazing, whispering, “I told you not to mix the spices.”

By nightfall, the stalls were smashed to rubble, the caravans were burning, and our once-golden bazaar had become a glowing war zone.

The Age of Spice was over… Golem Rage had begun!!!
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💥⚙️ The Rage Awakens ⚙️💥

Panic spread faster than common sense.

Jason, forever the optimist, believed calm reasoning could still prevail. He climbed a dune, hands raised, and shouted, “Let’s not make this weird!” The dune immediately collapsed swallowing him whole. A moment later he burst out, coughing sand and shouting, “Okay—it’s weird!”

Brad, the builder and pragmatist, went practical. While everyone else screamed, he grabbed a toolkit and ran toward the nearest golem, shouting, “Maybe they’re just misunderstood machinery!” His optimism lasted right up until the golem picked him up and slammed him as a hammer. When he reappeared, covered in dust and mild regret, he muttered, “Okay, that’s on me.”

Jeff, the natural opportunist, saw not monsters but customers. In the middle of the chaos he unfolded a table, slapped down a sign that read Limited-Time Golem Insurance, and began offering “comprehensive protection for conscious beings.” The nearest golem flattened the table before the first signature. Without missing a beat, Jeff declared bankruptcy, swept up the wreckage, and began selling the shards as premium collectible debris.

Tim, the mystic technician, took the scenic route to catastrophe. Kneeling in the sand, he drew containment runes meant to pacify the crystal surge. Instead, he accidentally formed a perfect summoning circle. The air flared, and the number of golems doubled. His tattoo began to glow bright green — a terrible omen — as everyone else took a strategic step backward.

Sasha, the gentle tank, decided violence could be reasoned with. He walked straight up to a roaring golem, arms open, and said, “Buddy, we can work this out.” The golem swung. Sasha sighed, ducked, and upper-cut it into next week. “My bad,” he apologized mid-punch. “Reflex.”

Kelly The Professor, remained perfectly composed. She raised her hands mid-battle and shouted, “Everyone stop! They’re breaking turn order!” The golems ignored her, mostly because they didn’t have turns. Unimpressed, she produced a spiral-bound binder titled Laws of Crystal Dynamics – Annotated Edition. She managed three full pages of citations before a golem stomped on her chart. She nodded once, produced another scroll, and muttered, “We’ll play sudden-death then.”

And somehow — through an improbable collision of incompetence, luck, and luminous energy, it worked.

Jason’s shouting echoed across the dunes, his voice bouncing between crystal ridges until the vibrations knocked loose a cascade of glowing shards. The falling shards struck Jeff’s shattered insurance stand, the scattering debris fragments catching the sunlight and refracted it into blinding arcs of light. Brad, still clutching his dented wrench, threw up an arm to block the glare—and accidentally launched the tool straight into one of Tim’s containment runes. The circuit flared to life, green light pulsing through the sand like a heartbeat. Kelly’s binder suddenly snapped open while being pulled into the updraft, her annotated pages catching the glow and turning it into a blinding mirror of academic fury. And Sasha, seeing the storm ignite around them, did the only thing that made sense: he threw one final punch straight into the beam…

The entire desert exploded in color!!!!

For a heartbeat, the world hummed—a single note of chaos resolving into silence .......... then, one by one, the golems dimmed and fell silent, their cores flickering out like dying stars.

Jason put his hands on his hips and surveyed the devastation.
“See?” he said proudly. “Positive energy works.”
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🔥🌀 Reconstruction & Regret 🌀🔥

When the dust finally settled, the bazaar looked like a bad memory held together by stubborn optimism. The golems were gone—mostly—and everyone was left sweeping up glowing gravel and pretending this was fine. No one had seen John P since the explosion, though rumors claimed he was “out there somewhere,” still trying to patent the Perpetual Pepper Engine 3.0.

By sundown, the survivors had done what they always do: stacked the tables, gathered the pieces, and convinced themselves it was time for just one more game.

Because if history’s taught them anything, it’s that progress is just the prequel to the next disaster.
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🎲 WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW 🎲

🎉 New Players Welcome – First time mining in Caravania? We’ll teach the rules, dodge the rubble, and pretend this is all normal.
🎯 Game Selection – Chosen the usual way: loud opinions, mild bribery, and one questionable hand-raise that somehow counts as democracy.
🎮 Got a Favorite Game? – Bring it, pitch it, and pray the Golem doesn’t crush your argument mid-sentence.
🎭 Dress Code – Crystal casual. Bonus points for reflective safety gear or anything that screams “I survived a light-based explosion.”
🍇 Etiquette – No shouting “I told you so” unless you actually did. Respect turn order… or at least pretend convincingly.
⚠️ Warning – If something starts humming, glowing, or asking for a “power source,” that’s your cue to scoot back.
📜 Fun Fact – The average Golem has no brain, yet still out-strategized three of us last week.
🧂 Table Talk – Salt content acceptable up to 12 ppm. Excess sarcasm may crystallize mid-air.

- Your Dust-Covered Merchant of Miscalculated Miracles

📜 SINCE OUR LAST MEETUP 📜

✈️ Rumor has it Patty has RSVP’d from Mexico, though sources can’t confirm whether she herself is returning or just her Wi-Fi signal. Either way, the banner welcomes her home and so does the golem still holding her seat.
🎃 Mel’s Halloween Party is still under investigation by local authorities. Witnesses report excessive laughter, a missing skeleton, and one donut-related incident classified as “frosting-terrorism.
🔮 The Oracle reactivated, mumbling something about “Crystals… again?” before short-circuiting in a flash of blue light.
💰 Jeff pivoted to selling “crystal-infused air.” It’s free to breathe but subscription-based for exhales.
🧠 Nathan was sighted in the wilderness of Red Deer, running TTRPGs and performing psychological evaluations on goblins. If you find him, remind him we still exist (and we’re not just in his campaign notes).
👤 Jon P and Kyle remain missing somewhere beyond the crystal fields — last seen chasing experimental energy readings and arguing over who gets naming rights to the next disaster.