20th March - 1655, Ingenious, Mundus Novus

Matts choice so he chose 1655 Habemus Papam which is a game about selecting and voting for the pope. There are loads of games with this theme but this one rises to the top.

Garry 16, Steve 15, Matt 11

Then a game of Ingenious.

Matt 12, Garry 8+, Steve 8

After these 2 games we still had time for more so we had a game of Mundus Novus.

Matt 86, Garry 71, Steve 64

13th March - String Railway: Transport & Santiago de Cuba

It was my choice this week so it was an ideal opportunity to play a train game, not enough time to play 1830 so we tried String Railway: Transport a Japanese train game where the tracks are pieces of string. I thought it would be a light fun family type game but it turned out it's a 'proper' game about route planning and goods delivery. Excellent game, can't wait to play again.

Garry 31, Steve 19 (2nd on tie break), Matt 19

String Railway plays nice and quick so we had time for Santiago de Cuba which nicely distills Cuba down to an hour or so.

Matt 37, Steve 30, Garry 27

6th March - Assriya

Another bargain from the works for £7.99, and I can kind of see why. Assyria isn't a bad game but it just feels as if they tried to jam in one mechanisim too many. Each part of the game worked quite well on it's own but together it became a bit messy.

Ben 128, Matt 123, Steve 115, Garry 111

28th Feb - Mundus Novus & Samurai

Just 3 of us this week. We started with Mundus Novus a nice meaty card game, once you get past the poorly written rules it flows quite nicely.

Steve won, Garry 74, Matt 69

The time for an oldie, Samurai, I'd forgotton what a brain burner it can be.

Steve 1st, Garry 2nd, Matt 3rd

21st Feb - Navegador

First up was Navegador, a 'rondel' game that I bought at Essen in 2010. Really good game, lots of ways to win and very little down time. Richard won by colonising anything that stood still long enough.

Richard 106, Garry 92, Steve 82

We had some time left so decided to play the brain burning trick taking card game Flaschentufel (or Bottle Imp in English). I only manage to get the hang of this game by the time we finish playing, but at least I managed a joint win (yay!).

Garry 66, Steve 66, Richard 22

It was a shame that Matt wasn't here this week as I'm sure he would have really enjoyed himself.

15th Feb - Santiago de Cuba

A few weeks of no games due to people being away skiing/sick/laying on beaches etc. 3 of us managed to get together a played a couple of games of Santiago de Cuba. Great game it dosen't take too long so not outstaying it's welcome. Managed to get 2 games in.

Ben 45, Garry 39, Steve 36
Steve 48, Garry 38, Ben 36

17th Jan - Power Grid: The First Sparks

Been a while since I updated this blog, sorry about that. Anyway we played this new variation of Power Grid set in pre-historic times. In theory it looks like a good game however there is one major flaw, It's possible to get youself stuck in a loop where you can just about to feed your people but not buy any more cards, and there's nothing you can do, this is as good as player elimination. A poor design in my mind. This one's going on the trade list.

To make up for the pain of First Sparks we played Hol's der Geier which was great fun.

I lost the slip of paper with the scores on.