Santa’s helpers have been hard at work for months. Initial designs involving Jenga blocks, wood slides, magnetic tags & pegboard did not make the cut so the problem was thrown over to Santa’s IT elves. They have come up ‘Trumps’, with a big brassy, temperamental and refreshingly random scoring system for which the Head ‘elf’ has purloined the monitor kindly donated by Howard & Catherine and a laptop belonging to Mrs Head ‘elf’. (If anybody has a USB mouse they could err.. lend for a few months, please plug it into the aforementioned laptop).

You will receive an e-mail* telling which of the three ‘Packs’**, headed by Rudolph, Donner & Blitzen, you are in. Please play frequently and often against members of your and other Packs (Singles or Doubles). Santa’s IT elf assures us the scoring system is so simple Santa himself could use it. The set-up is in the Blue Court Dedans. All you need to do is highlight your name and click on ‘WIN’ or ‘Lose/Draw’ as appropriate. No need to enter the actual score. This is all for fun and the IT elves have promised us the beta version of the software just as soon as they have finished some deliveries in a couple of weeks. (We told them to use Amazon’s new drones but they insist that Santa is somehow better ‘suited’)

* Instructions and background to the Jingle Bingle included with the e-mail
** OK, for you pedants, we are quite aware that reindeer come in ‘herds’, not ‘packs’. But then nobody has had a hit with a song called ‘Leader of the Herd’, so Vrrrmmm, Vrrrmmm…
*** Talking of ‘Leaders of the Pack’ when the Jingle Bingle closes on January 17th 2017 (unless R, D & B decide otherwise) the three LotP will be recognised with valuable prizes when frankly just a mention on the Club’s website would more than satisfy yours truly.

ps If the scoring system is by some remote chance non-operational, please write the name of the two (or four) players and highlight the winner(s) on the back-up ‘sheet of paper’