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With Andrew a late-drop-out, Martin's suggestion of a six-player opener looked in danger, until Adam H became a late addition. With him around the table were Adam T (who brought After Eights), Ian, Martin and myself (Sam) with Katy en route, delayed by social activities. When she finally arrived we had Letter Jam set up and ready to go, Adam and Ian had been informed of the rules, and poor Katy barely had time to tell us she'd bought a chocolate yule log (which I hid from the boys) before she was sat down and the game began. Katy immediately looked at her own cards and had to be given a new word, but after that the game was relatively serene, apart Katy's insistence that she couldn't get her letters and Martin telling her it was obvious.

Ian also spent some time looking baffled, but as it turned out we collectively did rather a good job - everyone identified their words and Martin and Adam T added extra letters at the end: the game rated us delicious, which is our best effort yet. "How the fuck do you get 115 points?!" Martin exclaimed, looking at the scorecard, before realising we'd need to take on the six-letter challenge. One for next time, maybe.

It was all so exciting and After Eight-fuelled that I didn't take any photos, but here's one from another time.

I was going to try and tempt the Adams to try Ragusa, but Adam T had a game called Christmas Tree with him and all things considered it seemed inappropriate to pass on it. Katy joined us while Ian, Adam H and Martin played Azul and made pointed comments about their game finishing before ours started.

But Christmas Tree mechanically is rather simple - a drafting game where you add a tile to your tree and look for multiple ways of scoring: patterns of bauble colours or shapes, lights, candy, gingerbread men. Where it gets complicated is in the scoring, as some things will score and some won't, and you won't know which scoring tiles the other players have chosen until you've laid your first couple of tiles.

Adam went into an early lead, but Katy pulled him back mid-game. I'm pretty duff at these multiple-consideration games (it reminded me of Circle the Wagons in that regard) but it was rather fun all the same:

Adam 156
Katy 153
Sam 106

By which time Azul had concluded...

Ian 70
Martin 69
Adam H 65

and Adam had revenge in a game of NMBR9 which happened so fast I missed the opportunity to take pictures again...

Adam 81
Martin 59
Ian 40

Now back as a six, there was a brief chocolate yule log interlude courtesy of Katy, before we settled on the last game of the night: First Contact. It was still in its shrink-wrap and nobody knew the rules, but fortunately that didn't stop Martin diving in and teaching us on the spot. Here's what happened:

Ian, Katy and I were aliens who flew to Earth in ancient times and established contact with the Egyptians - specifically, Martin and the Adams. We managed to communicate the meaning of three hieroglyphs to them (for instance, metal, pointed, alive) before translation got more difficult, and we needed to communicate meanings via a kind-of process of elimination on a 5x5 grid of things (very like Codenames) that shared some facets of meaning.

Both teams have the same 25 words to hand, but the Egyptians don't know the attendant hieroglyph and the aliens do. The Egyptians can work out a meaning by indicating a few cards (for instance the lion, spear, snake cards to get the hieroglyph for Danger) but as we discovered it is possible for things to get lost in translation.

Conversely, the alien team are trying to get the Egyptians to identify specific cards (see: Codenames again) by clueing them hieroglyphs - if the Egyptians identify the card in question, the active alien puts a token on it and gives another to anyone who successfully identified it. Note it's the active alien: although there are aliens and Egyptians in teams, the game is actually won by individuals: an alien wins by getting rid of three tokens, or an earthling wins by collecting three tokens.

Although it was the wrong time of the evening for Ian, who looked like he was starting to melt towards the end, I think we were all rather enamoured of First Contact in the end, although Martin caused a mini-contretemps when he changed his final guess after the Adams had revealed theirs - and Katy had given away some information! Martin insisted he'd noticed neither and was the winner, although the Adams did not look convinced.

To be fair though, ending the night on an argument about what was said and done in the distant past did make it really feel like a proper Christmas-themed evening. Thanks everybody!