This week, we were treated to a theatrical farce starring Mr & Mrs Walmsley, Julia's mobile phone and a locked door. Figure it out for yourselves. After the entertainment ended, we started with Leader 1, a game Mark W has been wanting to try for ages. Guy surprised us all by NOT breaking away on the first turn. In fact he stayed in the peloton until the top of the main climb. Mark W decided he needed to push his riders to the limit and in succession, they both cracked making things very difficult for him from then on, but very amusing for the rest of us. I managed to lose the victory conditions and we agreed that first rider over the line would win. Although I found a note on awarding team points based on finishing order just as Guy crossed the line (which would have given me the victory rather than him), my subsequent hunt for clarification on the Geek found that the team scoring was a variant, the original rules don't actually specify who wins anywhere within them, but first over the line is actually the right victory condition. Well played Guy. Meanwhile one of Mark W's riders was swallowed by the peloton before reaching the line and no-one was ever sure whether he might not still be crawling his way through the French countryside.

The other table went for Stefan Feld's Castles of Burgundy and it looked quite close between Nige and Mark K but Nige managed to edge a valuable win for a much more respectable win percentage at the end of January than this time last year.

We finished off with a game of Lost Temple, which I enjoyed more this time with five players than with eight. It was quite a strange game with the Shaman quite often turning up as one of the discarded characters at the start of the round. However, it got very close at the end with any one of three people in contention to reach the temple first. However, Pete was the one who managed it to take a fine win.

Ten of us this week so we split into two groups. My group of five played the latest incarnation of Alan Moon's Airlines series - Airlines: Europe and it played very smoothly. Andrew benefitted from not having any opposition in the white airline and managed to hang on despite a strong comeback from Mark K and Nige. A very close result.

The other table of five started off with Mission: Red Planet, another nice game from a few years ago by Bruno Faidutti. Pete and Julia had not played before whereas veteran Steve used his experience to grab the victory by a comfortable margin.

Our table turned next to Tom Lehmann's The City, a very stripped down variation on the San Juan / Race for the Galaxy idea of building up a tableau of point-scoring cards, while using other cards to pay for the cards you want to lay. This is a very quick race to gain 50+ points and if you get left behind, you stand little chance of catching up unless you've built a monster point-scoring tableau by the end. This ended up being a two horse race between Nige and me, with me just pipping him for the win with our last card lay. Probably 20 minutes playing time tops.

After settling the red planet, the other group opted for some black market dealing in Cargo Noir. This took a lot longer to finish than anyone expected - Mark W even fell asleep waiting for the game to finish (luckily he wasn't one of the players). Guy decided to just keep piling his pieces into Macao and this proved the most effective strategy as he ended up winning by a country mile.

Our final game was the excellent Transamerica. I was able to get close to completing my city connections in the first two rounds and, with some assistance from the others building routes just where I wanted them, finished the third round very quickly while the others were still multiple links away from a complete connection. A second win of the night led to the typical calls from Nige of "picking short fillers just to grab hall of fame points". I'm saying nothing.

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.