Mark G had to leave at that point so the rest of us tried this new card game from Reiner Knizia. The circus is in town and the players are aiming to play cards, representing the individual attractions such as acrobats and fire-breathers, to tempt more spectators to their part of the circus than other players’ parts. Each player gets a hand of five cards and on your turn you play a card and take a number of spectator tiles, dictated by the card. Most of the cards show spectators being drawn from a common pool, but playing a candy floss card allows you to take two spectators from one of your opponents, and a Lion card forces your opponents to return spectators to the pool. Once all 60 spectators have been taken from the common pool, the round ends and players record the number of spectators they have gained. Three rounds are played and the person with the highest total of spectators wins.

This is not the most complex Reiner Knizia game you are ever going to play. It is more of a children’s game and the age guide of 7+ is probably stretching things a bit (5+ is probably closer to the mark). Your success depends pretty much on the cards you draw and on the other players making sure they peg back an obvious leader. So it was no real surprise to find that our scores on the first two rounds were 19,20,21 and 20,20,20. In the final round I managed to grab a bit of a lead at the expense of Nige, although this was not through any tremendous play on my part. We did play all three rounds although we were inclined to call it a day after one, but it’s not going to be making any regular appearances at the club. It is ok as a children’s fun game though, which I’m sure is where it was aimed at.