The most difficult task of the Sunday is always to find two contiguous boards for the famous session of bughouse on giant boards. This year there were many free boards at the time we came and we tried to look for an improvement over the usual boards, which have the drawback that both boards are wrongly oriented, thus reversing all square colours.
Clearly the persons who drew the about 12 giant chess games had no idea about bughouse! No other boards appeared to be really side by side, there was one possibility of two boards no too far from each other letting only one board wrongly oriented, but both boards completely in the sun. But wait... I spotted one chess board and a checkers board which look perfect! Just after we moved half of the checkers away I noticed that it was a international checkers board, thus 10X10. Back to the usual wrongly oriented boards, at least they were in the shadow of the trees.
Damned again! During the time when we were unpacking the clocks and distracted when we tried to set the times to 7 minutes, two players elected one of our boards for a casual game. As they seemed not willing to move to another board but playing quite fast, we agreed that they would first finish their game. Mistake! The fast opening turned into a lengthy final of B + 6 pawns vs N + 6 pawns, which delayed the play on giant boards for some time.
We then played 5-minutes games on the giant boards, as the clocks weren't displaying the seconds when set to 7 minutes. This plus the warm day made the play quite exhausting, and nobody played for very long. Me and Ishamael were probably the most successful team (at least the fastest).
Still, one try of mine to flag Firefly failed when we both elected the strategy to play pawn moves at the queenside (close to the clock). We had time to play something like a3 a6 b3 b6 c3 c6 b4 a5 c4 b5 c5 a4 before Ishamael got mated by Tjeulesbetes with one second remaining to Firefly.
We didn't understand at once why two old people watching our game were shouting at us in disregard. Their point was that was we were idiots to show off playing with clocks while we didn't even know how to set up the pieces in order to have a white square to our right. As Wayra then tried to explain to them the game we were playing, they show little interest but in giving her some explanations about the game of chess. She got by this way the priviledge to learn that knights never, ever, moved in a L shape (they seemed completely appalled when she said this), but moved on a crown, as Bobby Fischer once pointed out.