It's late, so this entry will show up under Wednesday instead of Tuesday. Oh well. Game night began with only Matt, so we broke out one of our new games, Coda. It was a great deal for $8 at Barnes and Noble. Coda is a quick deduction game where you have black and white tiles with numbers 0 to 11 on them. Place them in order so you can see them, lowest to highest, and then start taking turns guessing individual tiles of your opponents. The pieces of the puzzle add up quickly, and the winner is the last one with standing tiles. We played three rounds with each of us winning one.

As we wrapped up the third round, Burr and Natalie arrived, so we broke out another new game, Alhambra, the Spiel Des Jarhres winner for 2003. We have the German version of the game (luckily all the game components are pretty much language independent) so we donned our German accents and set about building our palaces. Matt quickly built up a commanding lead in Gartens, while Natalie diversified her portfolio with Gemachers and Turms, with Laura, Burr and myself lagging behind. The first scoring card came early, the second one rather late, so we quickly scrambled to buy and place our last tiles, with the game ending too soon for all of us, and Natalie won with 94 points.

The third game of the evening was my African violets prototype. It was the first outing with five players, and it went suprizingly well. I've tried to make some improvements for speed and to add in some strategy and they seemed to work out well. The game clocked in at about 90 minutes, and it took seven rounds for someone to reach 40 points, meaning there was some battle for the club presidency. Once again, no one opted for a pest infection, so that mechanic remains a little underplaytested. Everyone was able to find a good collection of plants, and the maladies kept some good tension in the gameplay. My favorite part is trying to figure out what everyone else is collecting, based on what they do and don't play in the shows. I've had a few people express interest in the game, so once it settles down I'm thinking of trying to make a few copies for sale online, nothing professional, all hand-made, but that's part of the fun. It's getting to the point where I don't have changes after every game, only small modifications, and the playtesters were rather happy with how things went.