Cooperative Gaming Cocktail Adventure

Although I could hold my own in Uno after school at the local YMCA, competitive gaming wasn’t really my thing.

As little kids, my best friend Sarah and I turned Monopoly into a cooperative endeavor, pooling resources to help each other. Overhearing our conversation, Dad came into the living room and tried to explain the real rules to us. Didn’t sound like much fun.

Fast forward to adulthood. My valiant effort to win the Power Grid game with only renewables failed utterly. One New Year’s Eve, fighting a cold, I nodded off while friends got into an hours-long trading game called Puerto Rico involving indigo, corn, and doubloons. “Rando,” an extra player assigned random cards, destroyed me repeatedly in Cards Against Humanity. This isn’t to say I never had fun on game nights. I just got a lot more enjoyment from conversing with friends and family over food and drinks.

Perhaps it’s only fair that the dear friend who introduced me to my nemesis, Rando, opened my eyes to new cooperative board games. During the pandemic, Guillaume and I have turned to Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert regularly, rapidly going another round any time we get collectively killed by flooding or a sandstorm, to prove that we really can strategize effectively together.

For Christmas he gave me Paleo, a complex cooperative game with more little pieces and instructions and “modules” than any game I’d ever played before. After a few times muddling through, stopping to consult the manuals (plural), we both got sucked in.

This game takes over our dining room table and we tend to play after it gets dark, when there’s no possibility of a walk. The perfect time for a nice glass of wine or pre-dinner cocktail. Recently, between rounds, Guillaume commented, “We need to extract the dreams,” meaning removing all the dream cards from the active card deck.

I love that phrasing. Inspired by the bowl of clementines on the counter and a new bottle of more gingery ginger liqueur, I got to work. Between sips, we pooled our resources and strengths, and won together.

Dream Extraction
Makes 1 cocktail

1 fresh clementine
1½ oz. Bourbon
1 oz. ginger liqueur (I like Canton)
1 ice ball or several ice cubes
Grapefruit soda (Q Drinks preferred)
Bitters, such as Angostura

Rinse and dry the clementine. Carefully peel off a piece of the rind for garnish. Cut the clementine in half.

Add an ice ball or several ice cubes to a lowball or tumbler. Add the clementine peel garnish.

Squeeze juice from half of the clementine into the glass, around ½ ounce.

Measure out the Bourbon and ginger liqueur, pouring them into the glass as well.

Top it off with a little grapefruit soda. On my kitchen scale it was around 55g.

Add a couple drops of bitters. Mix gently with a spoon or stirrer. Enjoy!