Tuesday games are going strong again, with regulars Matt and Kathleen back in the groove with us tonight. Matt showed up first, so we started with our new filler game King Me. There are thirteen characters on the board, and players compete to have their chosen characters approved to be the next king. Only three players made for some weird group-think, the first round, we only voted out one character before deciding on a king. The second round, we made it through about 10 before a new king was chosen, and the thrid round, the first candidate succeded! I think this will play better with more people, but it was a good starting game with just the three of us.

Kathleen showed up next, and we were off for cross-country adventure with Ticket to Ride. It was Kathleen's first time playing this new hit, and she pulled off her tickets remarkably well. We made a change to the initial ticket distribution, as a number of our previous games have been decided because of long ticket draws. Inspired by the rules for the upcoming Ticket to Ride: Europe, we sorted out the six longest tickets, gave one to each person and discarded the rest. Everyone drew two other tickets and the game played as before. It seemed to make a difference, no one was left very far behind, but some of the tension was gone knowing that everyone probably had one east-west long route in their hand. We'll try it again and see how it stands up.

Our third game was once again Ultra-Violets, I'm getting in lots of playtests these days. This time we used a smaller plant deck, which made for some close competition for plants as well as for the club president. The universal pest infection is working well, although I'm still worried about how short the game seems these last few times; ultimately it should be 7-8 rounds, this time it took six. It's like writing a computer program, and now we're in the debugging phase; if only it didn't take so long to compile and run. Next week we'll ease up on the playtests and let everyone else pick the games we play.