With nine of us this week, we split into groups of five and four. The larger group started with Paris Connection, a game I'd received for Christmas. It's a game of balancing share trading with track building to boost the value of each company's share price and plays really quickly. Scores tend to be fairly close and in this game there was a spread of only 12 points between first and last, with Guy taking the plaudits.

The second table of four opted for Fortuna, an Essen release last year from the designers of Pillars of the Earth. The game is both a race to the centre of Rome and a resource manipulation game to better your chances of moving forward and gaining priveliges (which can generate further victory points). The interesting mechanism is in the choice of actions. Players have three actions available to them and, having exercised one of them, they then swap that action with one of their opponents. Once someone reaches the centre of Rome, points are awarded for how close to Rome you are (with anyone stranded outside the gates of Rome being eliminated) together with points from the priveliges you collected.

I went for a strategy of getting married and building a palace, together with acquiring two vestal virgins, which gave me the opportunity of moving quickly without spending resources. However, I missed out on a number of priveliges which was what Mark K was concentrating on. Nige was giving me a run for my money in the race to Rome but I set myself up for potentially reaching Rome quite a bit earlier than anyone else. However, the dice failed me and Nige was able to get to Rome first. On the plus side, I could still reach Rome and pick up a privelige card (which would have won me the game) if I could roll a three or more on either of two dice. Result: a pair of two's. Doh! In the end though, Mark K took full benefit from the priveliges he had collected to top Nige's score for the win. We liked the way Fortuna played quite a bit but the fact that the game could turn quite dramatically on a good or poor dice roll detracted a little bit. It didn't bother me as much as Nige - particularly as a clue is in the title: You need good fortune to win Fortuna.

Having a better idea about of how to play the game, the table of five chose to play Paris Connection a second time (particularly as it is very quick to play). This time Julia had a little trouble with the scoring, as the results sheet shows Andrew winning, then Mark W, with the eventual victor being Andrew all along. Remedial arithmetic classes for Julia, I think! Again, a pretty close result with 22 points separating first from last.

The group of five then played the what-shall-we-play-next game for several rounds before fixing on Lemming Mafia. This was Mark W's choice so it comes as no surprise that he won - although his banker game of Take It Easy last week didn't pan out as he had planned. Julia managed an impressively bad -4 points from her mission cards, whereas Mark W's successful missions were enough to give him victory.

My table of four finished off with the excellent Biblios, although this particular session was very unusual as almost all the dice manipulation cards came out right at the beginning of the game. Mark G was aclear leader in green, which he managed to boost to a value of five and none of us could bring it back down again. In the auction phase, Nige paid 13 gold for a red 1-point card, which seemed ambitious but it turned out to be just enough for him to win the red dice and tie with Mark G on five points. However, Mark had some cash left, 4 gold to be precise, whereas Nige had none so Mark G took a very satisfying tie-break win to leave Nige gutted.

To end the night, there was a second attempt at racing lemmings into the harbour. This time, it was a two-horse race between Guy and Andrew. Both got six points from their bets but Andrew managed seven points from missions to Guy's five. Pete and Mark W didn't even trouble the scorers.

Our first session of 2012 was held at Julia's house as I was in Tenerife. Seven turned up so they split into two groups with the first table of four starting out with Oregon. This looks like it was pretty close with Mark W edging the win from Julia.

The other table of three opted for Age of Steam and this also looks like a closely fought contest. Nige put his bad start to 2011 behind him and took the win by a slim two points.

After Oregon, the table of four still had time for three rounds of Take It Easy. They aggregated the scores and Mark G was clearly the most consistent with an impressive 582 points.