You know how it goes – you have no food or booze in your home so you need to leave the house, so you text your friends to see if they want to meet you some­where, and so they do, and you get food and you get booze, and that’s a good thing, but then UGH, you’re stuck talk­ing to your friends. Some bars solve this prob­lem by being far too loud to man­age con­ver­sa­tions, but bet­ter bars help you cope by provid­ing board games.

To avoid hav­ing to actu­ally talk to your friends, we sug­gest that you check out Duke Carvell’s, the South­ern Cross and Monterey New­town, all of whom provide a selec­tion of games like Scrabble or Risk that you can use for a very pleas­ur­able quiet even­ing out.

Oth­er bars provide pub quizzes so you have some­thing to talk about. I used to love the Elec­tric Quiz on Tues­days at the South­ern Cross until a) the good quiz mas­ter moved away and b) they star­ted doing 2‑for‑1 stone grills on Tues­day nights and now the whole place smells like ran­cid meat (and I’m say­ing that as an enthu­si­ast­ic car­ni­vore). Most quizzes in town are pretty gen­er­ic and far too sports-ori­ented, so I love one par­tic­u­lar quiz on Wed­nes­days that fea­tures cor­on­et-play­ing and crazy­ass spot prizes. Of course it’s at Mighty Mighty, and it’s hos­ted by our friend Richard from Fish­head Magazine. But don’t go to that, because my team The Jo Sand­wich will beat you.

Some­times quizzes are too hard though, and involve too much thought. I really wish we had a fun bar to play a cheeky game of bingo in. There was Bogan Bingo a while ago, but that’s not the same thing. I just wanna sit and listen to someone call out num­bers, and drink, and then maybe win some­thing. Wel­ling­ton, make that hap­pen okay?