With it having been four weeks since I last got to play at the Club, I was very keen to get a few games in tonight. We started off with Blokus, which is a pretty simple but quite challenging abstract game. Now I'm not a big fan of abstracts, but after trying it online, I was hooked. Each player has a set of 21 pieces of various shapes that they are aiming to place on a 20x20 square board. Your first piece is played from your home corner square and all subsequent pieces must connect to one of your existing pieces but only at the corner; they cannot connect along an edge but can share edges with the other players' pieces. Eventually, it will become impossible for you to place a piece, at which point you drop out and you score negative points based on size of the pieces you are unable to place. If you are able to place all your pieces (which is pretty difficult), you score positive points and the winner is the person with the highest positive score or least negative score.

Nige was groaning from the outset as he has great difficulty with spatial awareness games, but I insisted that the spatial awareness aspect wasn't that bad in this game. By the end, he agreed that it wasn't as bad as he thought it was going to be. I managed to weave my way across the board to best effect and grabbed the win. I do like this game - the way the colours spread across the board and interweave with each other I find very attractive. Also, you are trying both to set up ways for you to expand further all the time and restrict your opponents opportunities to expand. Very nice.