This week, we met at Phil’s and started off with the new Michael Schacht game, California, published by Abacus. This is quite an elegant game typical of Schacht about decorating a mansion and inviting guests round to view your pride and joy. The game is played over 12 rounds in each of which you collect coins or buy objects with which to decorate your house. Each room first needs a floor covering after which an object can be placed in it. When you place an object in a room, a guest calls round and, if you are already entertaining another guest, will bring a present (1 VP). You get further bonus VPs for being the first to furnish your mansion with certain combinations of objects and, at the end of the game, you receive 1 VP for every room you have renovated.

In our game, we all concentrated quite a bit on obtaining the lucrative bonus cards. John and I suffered a bit from quite a few of the rounds ending just before our turn and Mark G benefitted from being able to keep guests at his mansion which, in the end, helped him to take the win.

I thought this game was quite good and each round played very quickly. The balance between buying stuff early for a high price or taking a coin to reduce the price and risking someone else buying the object before it came round to you again was quite nice. It’s not a top ranking game; it doesn’t quite have a must play again factor, but it works and I’d be happy to play again.