This week, Steve had brought along the new expansion to Dominion so we decided to start with that. Nice that it allows five or six to play and the new kingdom cards look quite interesting. It was difficult to tell who was leading and Nige thought Steve had just pipped him. As it turned out, Mark G was only a couple of points behind Steve and Nige had just done enough to win. This looks like it is going to add lots more replayability by combining cards from both sets.

Our second game of the night was the card game of the card game. Modern Art, the board game, is little more than the cards with an auction mechanic. Modern Art: The Card Game replaces the auctions with a set-collection mechanic but is otherwise very similar. Well, it seems pretty easy to get stuffed in the five player game as each round can be ended very quickly. I can certainly testify to that as I failed to get more than one card in the main scoring collection, whereas everyone else seemed to have a good selection of those cards. Mark G and Nige appeared to be in good position but Mark K, who had been close to my lowly score after the first two rounds, scored a massive 43 points in the final round to ease past the others for the win.

Cash-a-Catch report soon.

Witch's Brew report soon.

This week, we tried out Ideology, a game that Nige had acquired at the UK Games Expo at the beginning of the month. This is a game about scoring VPs through spreading your ideology across the globe. Each ideology (Imperialism, Fascism, Communism etc) has a different advantage and disadvantage that means everyone approaches their expansion tendencies in somewhat different ways. Mark G ought to have been in a good position as there is a lot of potential for bashing your opponents. However, military attacks are only one way of infiltrating others' ideologies: cultural and economic influence can have equally devastating effects. The game ends once someone reaches 12 VPs.

Early in the game, it seems expanding your influence at home is key as this gets you more cards and more flexibility on subsequent turns. Mark K and I were both unable to do this at the start, which put us a bit behind early on. I made a land grab for a couple of countries which I only held on to for a turn or two as Guy and Nige's greater card numbers gave them both the ability to grab these countries from me. It came down to a final turn with all of Mark K, Guy and Nige having a shot at winning. However, Mark K could only do it by developing as much as he could, leaving him with no cards to defend in the conflict phase. Nige had the most cards to use and Guy made him waste as many of these as he could in stopping Mark K's chances. However, Nige was still able to hold onto the critical country as we weren't able to match his military defence and he ended up grabbing a good win.

Ideology was quite good but, for some, went on a little too long. There are some good ideas in the game and I'd definitely play again. And the end was reasonably tense as it wasn't clear who was going to win.

We finished off by playing Mow, a fun card game about cows trying to keep flies off them. That said, Nige was very adept at attracting flies - obviously his magnetic personality - he managed 42 in the second round and was just one fly off ending the game after just three rounds. It ended up being a two-cow race between Mark K and me but a poor third round by Mark couldn't be reversed in the final round and I took the victory.

Mow was a lot of fun and has a similar feel to 6 Nimmt. You don't have much control but there are elements of playing the percentages. That said, if you draw the wrong cards, you are doomed but the game is not meant to be a serious strategy game and is a nice way to wrap up the last thirty minutes of an evening.

I've not played Settlers for ages and I was keen to see what this new version was like so three of us gave it a go. It's not that different but has a fixed board and instead of upgrading towns to cities, you can build monuments, which give you one VP and a bonus of things like extra resource cards or a free road.

It seemed that early in the game it was tricky to expand quickly, although that may have been due to our dice rolls. Guy especially didn't seem to be able to expand very far. He was more interested in building his army. Mark G took the longest road for the first three quarters of the game but allowed me to steal it off him - helped by the road building development card I had picked up. Eventually, I managed to build a town, monument and reveal a VP development card on the same turn to claim the win.

I quite liked this version but the fixed board means there is a bit of a limit on replay value. Guy also didn't like the board layout, as it seemed to hamper the ability to expand, so early in the game we were just collecting resources with builds only occurring every two to three rounds. However, as I still really like the basis of the Settlers series, it scored pretty well for me.

While we played Settlers Germany, the three others played Martin Wallace's new Treefrog release, Automobile. The general reaction was it was good but a bit dry. Steve just won although Nige could have overtaken him if the demand had been just one car higher on the final turn.

After our Settlers outing, we decided to have another go at last year's Spiel-des-Jahres, Keltis (although Guy had not played it before). Mark G seemed to have this sown up by a big margin, easily plating more cards than Guy or me but he didn't get his double marker to the top of the scale, which made it closer than would otherwise have been the case. He still won but not by much whereas Guy and me seemed to draw wrong cards all the time. Still good fun though.

Once the other group of three had finished Automobile, they had about 20 minutes left so I suggested they try Keltis - the tile game. Very similar in gameplay to its older sibling, I like the spped with which it plays, while still giving players some agonising decisions. Nige took this one although Steve ended up in closer contention than he thought.