This week, there were six of us so we split into two groups of three. My group's first game was Macao, another excellent game designed by Stefan Feld and published by Alea / Rio Grande. The game features a nice dice mechanic to allocate action cubes. The number rolled shows the number of cubes you gain but also how many turns you have to wait to be able to use them. So if you choose to take six blue cubes, they only become available for use on the sixth action round after drawing them, whereas if you draw 1 red cube, you can play it on the next action round. Your actions are used to activate cards that give in-game or end-of-game benefits, take possession of city quarters, promote your turn order marker or move your ship towards the trading ports. You also get to trade in gold coins for victory points at a constantly evolving exchange rate. After 12 rounds, whoever has accumulated the most points wins.

We all enjoyed this one immensely as there is a lot going on in the game. At times, you are forced to put aside any strategic goal in order to gather the correct cubes to activate cards. Ignore this and there is a hefty penalty for having too many cards in your store or failing to activate by game end. Nige suffered from this by taking powerful cards that he then had difficulty collecting cube combinations for activation. Both Steve and Nige thought they would do things differently on a second playing and I agree that I had an advantage through having played before. That said, Nige gathered a nice collection of cards that saw him raking in points towards the end of the game. However, the penalties he picked up were too severe and I had also collected a couple of cards for nice end-game bonuses to ensure I grabbed the win. A very good game that we need to play again soon now that we all know how to play.

On the other table, Guy and Mark G were teaching Mark W how to play Diamonds Club. You would have expected experience to have told here as it is quite a tricky game. However, when the scores were revealed, Mark W had managed to pip Guy by a single point.

After Macao, our group decided (or rather Nige decided) to play one of his banker games, Web of Power. This turned out to be very close and I have to admit I thought Nige had it sewn up. However, I managed to secure a few cheap majorities in the council scoring whereas Nige concentrated on fewer regions but with more points to be had. This allowed me to keep just a nose ahead and score my second win of the evening. Lots of fun for such a quick game.

On the other table, they just had time for a couple of rounds of Take It Easy, which Mark W has been quite keen to play. No wonder, as he won both rounds for his second win of the evening. Combined scores shown below.

This week, we got to try Wolfgang Kramer's Alcazar, which is meant to be related to an earlier game, Big Boss, that I've wanted to play for several years. However, it turns out it's not close enough to the original to be classed as a new version of that game, although it holds its own as a different game more closely related to Torres.

Our play suffered from me not having read the rules thoroughly enough and discovering part way through that the victory conditions were different from what I'd initially thought. However, it was very close in terms of scores with me throwing away the win by being a bit too greedy at the end and Mark W knocking one of my barons off my tower. He played it well and just for that single play deserved the win. The git!

I was on holiday for this week's regular session so Nige recorded the scores. They played with all five expansions and Nige hadn't reckoned on the possibility of Goblins attacking four out of the five turns and lost a couple of buildings on the first two of those turns. Yet again, it looks as though it was monkey time at the zoo as Mark K recorded yet another win. Typical. You go away for a week and, when you get back, you're left to despair at the incompetence of some of your fellow (so-called) gamers.

As it was half term week, four of the guys arranged an extra session during the day to revisit Die Macher, which we've not played for some years. Mark K looked a pretty comfortable winner but the newbies seemed to enjoy it going by the ratings.

The second game from the extra session this week was Agricola and, although the scores were tight, Nige couldn't prevent Mark K from grabbing a second win.

This week, I had expected there to be six of us so was planning to split into two groups. However, when we learned Mark W was stuck on Ludlow station, we opted to try Friedemann Friese's latest game - Power Grid: Factory Manager - a game which has nothing to do with Power Grid but is still a tense, economic optimisation game.

The game is played over five rounds and each round is identical: Firstly, you bid for turn order tiles, which also determine how much discount you receive on your purchases each round. Then each player selects which factory components will be available for purchase, with the cheapest of each component having to be selected for possible sale before the more juicy stuff. Each player then buys what they want or can afford and places them in their factory. You are trying to obtain components that increase your production and storage or decrease your manpower requirements, while keeping control on your energy costs. Each time you add / replace something in your factory, you adjust these four factors and then receive income based on the lower of your production / storage capacity, after paying your energy costs (the price of which increases during the game. Income in the final round is doubled and then whoever has the most money wins.

We all thought this was an excellent design although, with five players, more stuff comes into the market and the length of the game increases accordingly. It took us around 2.5 hours to play, which is a bit long particularly as there is a big chunk of downtime while others take their turns. Nige and I almost decided to play a game of Macao while we were waiting at one stage. In the first round of our game, only one storage tile came up so the first player (me) snapped it up and gained an early income advantage on the others, although I had to tie up more workers for the next round. Mechanisation seemed a good option as it releases more workers to buy stuff with so by the third round some of us had factories completely populated by robots. I think Nige and I were the only ones to take seasonal workers in one round but Nige soon saw the error of his ways as he didn't actually employ them in the next round so had basically wasted 14 Elektros. The fourth round saw me last in player order but with nothing decent to buy. I needed storage but there was none so I had to have a frugal round, spending just a little on upgrading a couple of machines. However, it meant I needed to be first in player order for the final round and it cost me two workers to secure that. However, I could still afford it in my robot-run factory. Guy on the other hand had all bar one of his workers in the canteen, although he was ahead on the income scale the previous round, so we experienced the quickest Guy turn ever in the history of the club. He had placed his worker for turn order so could add nothing to the market and had nothing to buy. We knew the scores were going to be close but didn't realise it ws that close as just 6 Elektros separated first and third. My "bad" penultimate turn, where I virtually spent nothing was just enough to give me the win - phew! As I said, very tense. Ratings were pretty good although Nige and I knocked it down a notch due to the game length. Interested to see how it plays with 3 or 4 players.