With Christmas day and New Years day both falling on a Tuesday (and players valuing playing games with their family more than with other GOATS – can’t imagine why!) we decided to have an extraordinary meeting on the Thursday.

This week there were six of us, including two new people.  However, although we didn’t start until 8pm (as burgers and chips had to be dealt with), we still managed to squeeze in four games.

With Christmas so recent, everyone had new games to play, and the first one up was a Santa Special – Mundus Novus. This is a card game where players are seventeenth century Spanish ship owners, travelling to the New World and making their fortune.  It took us a while to get started, but once we got the hang of it, everyone started to rack up dubloons at a steady rate. We were pretty much neck-a-neck when the game came to a bit of a shuddering halt because one of us played the equivalent of a Royal Flush, which wins the game outright.

Next we played the “Feature Game” which was PitchCar, a gorgeous, dexterity car-racing game.  This game was also a Christmas Special and included the first expansion which has shicanes and jumps/bridges.  For this game we used one of the standard layouts making full use of the special features.

Once everyone had completed their qualifying lap, we were off.  Yellow, who won the qualifying, stalled on the grid, so Pink led into the first corner and got in everyone else’s way.  Meanwhile, Black went for a pitstop and came out Orange. After about half a lap, Green had got his nose in front and despite the best efforts of Blue and White (who came from the back of the grid to finish second), this proved an unassailable lead.

Next up was The Resistance: Avalon.  This game is a little different with players dividing into two teams, the Loyal Servants of Arthur and the Minions of Mordred, to go on a series of quests.  Arthur’s team want the quests to be successful, whereas Mordred’s team want them to fail.  The catch is, the Loyal Servants of Arthur don’t know who Mordred’s men are and players vote for teams to go on each quest.  The first two quests were successful, before the Minions managed to sneak in a failure.  After winning the fourth quest, the Loyal servants snatched defeat from the jaws of victory when Merlin was named correctly and assassinated.

The last game of the evening was an old favourite, Dobble and we played several chaotic rounds in different styles before we went home.

Learning Outcome: A little research before preparing your Christmas list goes a long way!