Game night

My friends and I once had a game night a long time ago - shortly after Suzanne and Nenen came to Manila and gave us all board games as gifts - but we never got around to staging another one. That is, until my friend Mike returned from his six-year stint in the US. Mike had a couple of board games that he wanted us to play. We set aside one Friday night for it.

We had dinner in Kirin in Bonifacio High Street before heading to Mike's place to play Settlers of Catan. The objective of game is to be the first person to earn 10 points by building a colony. Players can earn these points in a variety of ways, like building houses or putting together the longest road or amassing the largest army. There were quite a few of us - Mike, Joh, Raffa, Suzanne, Me-ann, Nats, Julie, and myself of course. It was especially nice to have Nats and Julie there coz it had been years since I hung out with either of them.


The game requires a lot of strategy and planning and it takes a while before someone manages to earn 10 points. We played two rounds - Mike won the first round and Julie won the second. We all enjoyed game night so much that a couple of weeks after the first, we set another one up while Che was in town. There were fewer of us in part 2: me, Che, Joh, Me-ann, and Mike. We ditched Settlers in favor of Ticket to Ride just so we could try a new game.
The objective of Ticket to Ride is earn the most number of points by completing train routes. We got to play only one round as people had to get up early the next day, and Mike, who is an expert on all these board games (he owns them after all), won yet again. Doesn't matter as we all had fun (apart from the fact that I kept singing the Beatles' song 'Ticket to Ride' the entire night, so much so that at some point we decided to play music so that I wouldn't drive everyone crazy LOL). Hopefully we can all get together every now and then to have more game nights.