He's so shell-fish

 I arrived at a little after 8 to find Ian, Joe and Martin sitting around a table of Polynesia, all set up and with Joe having already received a rules explanation, we were ready to dive in.

This game's special scoring criteria for today made masks and archipelagos very valuable and so it was no surprise to see Ian and Martin make a bee-line for the half of the board with the richest pickings. I, using the logic that you do well at games by not doing what other people are doing, set off for the less congested areas. Joe, not sure what he was doing, did a bit of both.

It was a quiet game, with a lot of pondering going on. I did ask, since it was us four, why we weren't playing Time Of Crisis only to be told it was still in the studio. But our thinking time was so long that it may as well have been ToC.

I found that I was frequently stranded, waiting for other players to land on my island so I could get a ride with them. This was usually Martin and I usually took him in a direction that he didn't want to go. Joe, meanwhile, found that most of his meeples ended up on the same island, which was swiftly dubbed "party island". Very sociable but no good for scoring points. Ian and Martin, who both played on Saturday, clearly has a better idea about what was going on.

In the end the game was getting perilously close to the full nine rounds, so in round seven we agreed that the next round would be the last, whatever the volcano did. Which was fair enough, since the tiles had all been taken and there was little else to do.

Martin 19

Ian 17

Andrew 13

Joe 11

There was a fair bit of ambivalence from Joe afterwards, who seemed to find it too opaque and it didn’t interest him enough to keep looking.

Next, we played Take The A Chord, which still baffled us. Joe explained the rules to Martin who must have done some research already since he filled in a few gaps in Joe's explanation along the way. As usual, playing a card was often accompanied by humming a note that may or may not have had some relationship to the note on the card.

I initially found myself frustrated because whenever I was about to win a trick, someone started improvising! Just like real jazz, that became quite annoying after a while. Nevertheless, I seemed to mostly have the right cards at the right time and scored highly on each round.

Andrew 125
Ian 95
Martin 60
Joe 40

After this, feeling somewhat tired and unwilling to play much beyond half past ten, I bowed out, leaving them to consider their three player options. Ra was mentioned, but I was out the door by the time a decision was made. Sorry to leave so soon, but thanks for the evening!