Our Klask Adventure: Gav's Behind-the-Scenes Blog (Patreon)

Hello all you beautiful Patrons, Gav here with a little behind-the-scenes blog about our recent Klask adventure. If you’ve not had a chance to check it out yet, make sure you do before reading cause there’ll be full spoilers ahead! I’ll try to keep the nudity to a minimum but be warned this blog features someone getting a tattoo on their foot...

Praise the Klask.

We love playing tabletop games together, as well as video games, and wanted to represent this on the channel. When the Klask people approached us with the idea of going to the World Championships, we genuinely had never heard of it. So we immediately looked it up, got ourselves a board, and properly fell in love with it. It’s so easy to pick up n play but very hard to master (we’re still working on that second part). 

We tried to steal this lighting for my flat. 

The UK Championships

I was really lucky to get to play Rob in the UK Championships. He’d eventually go on to win the tournament and represent the UK in Helsinki. I met him in the toilet after our match and he didn’t believe that I’d only been playing Klask for 7 days. I mean, it could’ve been that he just wanted to say anything to get out of the toilet but it was still nice to hear and made the 6-2 loss I suffered at his hands feel a bit better. 

Perfectly-poured pints brought to you by Gav. 

Helsink-or-Swim!  

The days in between the UK Championships and Helsinki flew by – mostly because we didn’t stop filming or editing our Resi series so we could go to Gamescom and straight into Helsinki without missing an episode of Retry. This meant I didn’t get to practice nearly as much as I’d hoped for the World Championships but I needn’t have worried because from the moment we landed in Finland, the only thing we did was play Klask (and booze (and booze and play Klask)). 

We actually had a couple of tourists watch this match. 

We were also incredibly fortunate to have our friend and former IGN colleague Rich Bearpark along to film everything. When we're on location, one of us has to be behind the camera, and suddenly it changes the entire dynamic. Having Rich allows us to capture not only beautiful shots we would've missed but us being natural comedy geniuses – in fact, he should be paying us for the privilege, not the other way around. The Patreon allows us to hire someone for the weekend and really make these projects feel special. 

Rich knows the angles that work for us. Primarily: wide. 

Heldrinky! 

We’re big fans of Old Lady Booze at RKG and there were three Finnish drinks in particular we fell for: 

• Karhu: Finnish beer named after a bear with a badass logo (remember this for later). 
• Minttu: A mint liqueur perfect to keep your bits warm when hopping between saunas. 
• Original Long Drink: A lovely can containing a mix of gin and grapefruit created for the 1952 Helsinki Summer Olympics. 

We ended up having a full-on holiday fling with Original after we discovered this delightful beverage on our second night and proceeded to try and drink Helsinki out of it (we failed). 

My heart belongs to Original Long Drink. 

You’ve seen the full results of a night on Original in the Mystery Island section of our video and while I won’t include anymore naked shots here what I can tell you is there a 10 minute version of that section that we have been referring to as ‘The Nips Cut’. I also have a very hazy memory of being hosed down by Powers – Shawshank-Redemption-style – whilst in the nip. 

What are we laughing at? I'll never tell...

I won’t dwell too much on the events of Mystery Island as I have already said in the video “what happens on Mystery Island STAYS on Mystery Island”, but we swiftly followed our adventures there with a trip to a local karaoke lounge where we belted out our now signature tune, ‘A Thousand Miles’ by Vanessa Carlton. They also served Original in pint glasses and I only tell you this because it resulted in an almost catastrophic hangover the following day at the World Championships. Luckily as a team we are well versed in the art of playing through the pain and a quick few Karhus made everything better. 

The World Championships 

Even though the people behind the scenes at Klask had been up until the early hours boozing with us, they still worked so hard on the day of the Finals to make sure the tournament ran smoothly and the livestream and studio sets were even built by Daddy Klask himself, Mikkel. We had a 9am start but it turned out my match with the World Champion wouldn’t happen until about 7pm so there was enough time for us to nurse our hangovers, have a good old wallow, and get as much Klask in as possible. 

The 2018 Klask World Champion. 

We filmed an entire sequence with the 2018 Klask World Champion, Jaro Koch, that sadly didn’t make the final cut. Although he beat me 6-3, he gave me some valuable last-minute pointers. Getting 3 points against the fella who was at the time the best player in the world properly gave me a little confidence boost going into my actual match. He said I was concentrating “too much on the biscuits” which, when you watch my final match, is absolutely bang on. 

Bit much if you ask me. 

I tried to hide it for the cameras but I was absolutely bricking playing Tomasz Preuss, the 2019 Klask World Champion. Tomasz is a very serious dude, and very serious about Klask, and from the moment he entered the arena at 9am he barely spoke to anybody and just listened to music on his headphones all day. Klask, at this level, is a serious business. We were meant to play a little best of 3 tourney but he requested it just be a single match – maybe he was scared or maybe he was knackered from playing Klask for almost 10 hours straight, I guess we’ll never know. 

Praying to the Klask Gods. 

There’s a bit in the video where I score my first point against Tomasz and Krupa runs over from his coach’s seat to celebrate with me. This made for a lovely moment in the video but was also 100% genuine because when we started this whole thing, we were expecting the match to be an absolute whitewash. Scoring ONE point against the best Klask player in the world felt like a huge win. In the end I scored two points against Tomasz and I was so happy that these came from biscuit plays. Out of everything I’ve improved on, not being afraid of biscuits and using them to my advantage was one of my best tactics I learned. 

The best backroom staff in the game. 

The second part of our video ends pretty much straight after my match with Tomasz but what followed was a night of celebration, lots more Original, and even more Klask. We were absolutely shattered by about midnight as the adrenaline started to wear off and that’s when Kristian – one of the fellas who works for the Klask company – challenged me to a special game of Klask. 

"...that's the real quiz!" 

It’s a tradition at big Klask events for a match to take place where the loser gets a tattoo of something relating to the winner’s country. Being the absolute idiot that I am, I accepted the challenge of a man who’s actual job is making, distributing, and playing Klask. The game was ridiculously tense and went to 5-5 with the loser of the next point resigned to getting inked the following morning. I’d become quite fond of the bear on the cans of the Finnish beer we’d been drinking so that was to be my new addition if I lost whereas Kristian had agreed to get “something Welsh”. 

The final point came after a wild and long rally but I’m happy to let you know that I do not have a Finnish beer’s logo currently etched into my skin. But there is a Finnish fella hobbling around Helsinki with ‘Iechyd Da’ (the Welsh phrase for ‘Cheers’) tattooed on his foot. 

I really hope it comes across in the videos but the entire Klask community was one of the most warm and welcoming bunch of people we’ve ever had the pleasure of being involved with. They absolutely got what we were trying to do with the project and were nothing but supportive from the start. 

Hopefully it also goes without saying – but I’m going to hammer it home anyway – that we really mean it when we say that none of these bonkers and brilliant video projects could happen without your support.We can’t thank you enough. 

Gav x