John had to leave at that point so we finished up with a couple of hands of Hat trick. This is one of my favourite little card games and can be quite nasty if people concentrate on scuppering their opponents’ hands rather than benefitting their own. This game turned out to be fairly friendly. In the first hand I had a long red suit and declared that early on, only to find the next minute that Mark G had decided to play for red as well. Nobody had much in the way of negative cards, leading to Mark K and Nige getting good scores, while Mark G and I shared the red ponts. In the second hand, everyone got balanced hands of five cards in each suit and nobody seemed very keen on committing themselves too early. Mark G ended up collecting cards in all three suits (not too good an idea) whereas I engineered a good enough score to tie with Nige at the end.