This week there were eight of us so an even split of two groups of four seemed the obvious choice. My table started with Castles of Mad King Ludwig, which we'd all played once before but I'd only tried solo - which obviously misses out the Master Builder element. The game is a refinement (for the better in my opinion, although some might argue differently) of Suburbia by the same designer, Ted Alspach. The game is about developing a castle with a variety of rooms that fit in with the objectives you are trying to achieve, some of which you've secretly been allocated and some are common goals). Each round, the Master builder draws some room tiles and allocates them to certain price brackets. The other players then get the chance to purchase a room, paying the Master Builder and he gets to purchase from what's left, paying to the bank. Once the supply of room tiles has been exhausted, the game ends and people score for their objectives and whoever has the most points wins.

As I suggested above, I enjoy Castles much more than Suburbia and the layout of your castle always provokes some fun discussion. Nicky was reinventing a classic British drama, Upstairs Downstairs, which meant that the rest of us were limited in our below-stairs development: Guy didn't buy a stairs at all. Instead, I was concentrating on activity rooms and bunching them together into an entertainment wing so I didn't suffer penalties from making too much noise next to the sleeping and other sedate rooms. And it worked, particularly as I had a good bonus objective linked into activity rooms, leaving me over 20 points ahead of Guy in second place.