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?