I love a game around the table after dinner. I don’t mean Snakes and Ladders or Scrabble, I’m taking about something erring on the side of untraditional and rather silly. Something, ideally, a bit messy. If people looks like idiots whilst playing it, so much the better (I grew up in rural Scotland where it rained almost constantly and we had to amuse ourselves…can you tell?).

So imagine my delight when I was asked by PL and AL for dinner this Saturday and after the most incredible food – we began with hand-picked crab amuse bouches and ended with pudding, cheese and port – they whipped out a box of After Eights.  Not to eat, you understand…but to play with.

For those of you who don’t know, this is how you play The After Eight Game:

*Warning: do not attempt this if you’ve had botox as a moving face is very much a pre-requisite (spot the secret injectors!)*

1. Take an After Eight out of its packet and slap it onto your forehead.

2. Without using your hands, get it in to your mouth.

This is done by moving and contorting your face into invariably hideous expressions with the aim of the chocolate sort of slip-sliding downwards, preferably towards your mouth.

Top tip: make sure the After Eights aren’t fridge-cold. But then again, make sure they aren’t melted either; in Singapore that gives you about a five minute gap between the two extremes.

After Eight box image courtesy of The Daily Mail, solitary choc shot via The Guardian

This clip below was emailed to me by one of my lovely readers after seeing this post. He says that his dog, Polo, mastered the game a long time ago. If you need to inspiration on how to do the After Eight Game properly, here you go: