This week, I had a craving for something sweet and chewy- so I made oatmeal butterscotch cookies- using the recipe on the back of the package. Even Best Recipes says that there is little need to change the Nestle recipes and I agree whole heartedly. I served some of the sweet treats at the game night and they were a big hit! The butterscoch taste is an unexpected yet welcome suprise in the cookies.

The first game we played was Quinto, a Scrabble-like game with numbers, where your legal "words" are multiples of five. Mark found this one at our local St Vincent DePaul's, buried amongst three old copies of Trivial Pursuit and Win Lose or Draw. Matt, our resident Scrabble expert, protested quite a few times that this was nothing like Scrabble. With five of us (Mark, Laura, Matt L, Mike and Kathleen), it took a while to get back to your turn, and while there was a lot of tactics and number-crunching, there didn't seem to be much long-term strategy, and Mike was the eventual winner. Don't know how often this one will get pulled out, the first player (this time me) seems to have a large disadvantage in not being able to make multiple multiples their first turn.

When Burr and Natalie arrived right as we finished Quinto, we set up to play a large game of Settlers, 5 people + 1 team (Burr and Matt L). The board was rather cramped, and everyone was struggling to build things, but I successfully defended the longest road and made it to the win first. It seems like the 3-4 player version had more tight action, and everyone is involved until the end, where in this game, a few people were too far behind to be in the running after half-way through the game.

It was getting rather late after Settlers, so Matt, Mark and I played a quick game of Ultra Violets. I tested out some of the new rules changes and a new way to determine the maladies each round. Different strategies are starting to emerge, and there's competition for the end points. We'll have to test more players soon, since I've added enough tokens for 6 players (although not enough leaves..) There always seems to be more to tweak and test the more it gets played.