Yesterday was Valentine's day (although we exchanged gifts a little early this year). Laura picked out the third Harry Potter movie for me, and I ordered another mushroom log for her. This year it was Laura's turn to plan our evening, so she cooked up some fabulous Chicken Parmesean with a side of mushrooms. The recipe was from Best Recipe, one of our favorite cookbooks, and as always, turned out amazing! We settled in for an evening of watching Harry's adventures at Hogwarts. This really is the best movie of the series, there was so much going on in the background, the acting was much more mature, and the visual feel of the movie was great; I especially liked the shots that took you through windows.

Tonight it was a Tuesday Games night. It took a while for everyone to arrive, so Laura and I played Gobblet four times in quick succession. Laura was in fine form, winning the first three games. I still have no idea how to play this game, Laura sees something I don't and is very good at responding to threats and putting me on the defensive for the whole game. Ad it takes about 5 minutes per game, which is a great filler while you wait.

Matt, Kathleen and Burr showed up all at once, so we pulled out one of our current favorites Ticket to Ride. This was Burr's first time playing, so we explained that it was going to be the most tense game he'd ever played, and the first half hour we wouldn't talk much, as we're so nervous about making our tickets, which turned out to be true more or less. The eastern seaboard crowded up very quickly, and I was almost cut off from having any transcontinental connection. The board became very dense, with much unintentional blocking (we still haven't given in to the dark side of blocking yet, but I know that day is coming...) and people started grabbing more tickets. I stuck with my initial two, Portland to Boston, and Montreal to Seattle, barely finishing them before the last round. Kathleen had the longest route and many more tickets, and sailed into the win with 120 points, ending the group anxiety-attack at last.

With Laura off to work and study for her class, Burr, Kathleen, Matt and I played San Juan. Laura and I have played this as a two-player game to much success, so it was interesting to see how it would work with larger numbers of players. Burr and Matt had played Puerto Rico before, so they had some intuition of how the game worked, but it was Kathleen's first role-selection game besides Citadels, and it works so differently in that game anyway. In this game, the councillor and prospector were called into play much more frequently as a way to get new cards, instead of the produce and trade method I was used to. We each got a bonus in either production or trading, and Matt and Burr built the Library for double privliges, with Kathleen going for monuments. It was a very close game at the end, all of us above 30 points, and in the end, Burr was successful with triumphal arch and two monuments to put him over the top. A relatively quick game with a deep feeling as you play, I'm more inclined to play this than Puerto Rico because of setup, and the neat trick where everything in the game is a card. See you next week.