After getting your call, Mark and I decided to kill some time with Cube Farm, which I always carry with me in my backpack (along with Fairy Tale) but tend to forget about. Despite some confusion as to what was and wasn't a legal path to the Elevator, we had a close back-and-forth game that repeatedly saw Mark sneaking in multiple Vice Presidents near my cubes. I eventually overcame those penalties and stole in the final hand by setting up a private oasis of desirable office supplies and effectively doubling my score.

While we were in the midst of the last couple of hands, Chip and Alton arrived. Since we were already using workers from Arkadia to represent our cubicle-dwellers, it seemed like the perfect excuse to get in our Game of the Month!. Alton was initially confused and thought we were actually playing Torres, which probably attributed to his abysmal performance, scoring only a scant 26 points if I remember.

Continuing the theme of mid-game arrivals, Jim showed up during our "3.5-player" Arkadia session. Once everything had been put away, we sought a good 5-player game, which is something like trying to pick the most delicious item in a candy store with t his group. Several possibilities were considered before we went ahead with Ra. This was apparently Mark's first play of Ra with more than three players and he claimed to be suffering from the lack of a fourth Sun, but the real problem was the weird tile drawing the five of us were doing. The first epoch saw at least 80% of the Civilization tiles, including at least four Writing, but only like two Floods and very few disaster tiles; the second epoch was the rainy season, as we were flooded by Floods. The third epoch went down to the wire, as the final Ra tile emerged with only three other tiles left in the bag. Ultimately, I once again managed to assemble a vast array of Monuments that, combined with Mark getting penalized for lowest Sun total, just barely pushed me ahead of Mark and Jim to take this one.

With James joining us and pushing our player count to six, our options diluted a bit. I eventually decided to give Tiki Mountain! a spin, after reading about it in my freshly-arrived GAMES. James had played once before, but essentially all six of us were new to the game given his grasp of how things actually worked. Even accounting for all of us having to figure things out, this game took way too long for what it was -- a full ninety minutes! There seemed to be a ton of deliberation (not AP, just outright thinking) that dragged things down, especially as obstacles started to pile up; a game this light shouldn't demand the amount of thought that was being put into it, which wore at my patience if not that of others. Combined with the somewhat lax rules that we've come to expect from Slugfest (and other companies, like Steve Jackson and Cheapass), Tiki Mountain! did not leave a good first impression on the group, although I think we were overly harsh. (Denise had to replace Mark when he had to go, but only got to play like one turn before Chip valiantly -- and finally -- saved us all from the Angry Volcano God.)

If they played anything after that, you'll have to ask them, because Tiki Mountain! finished up at 10.