A reunion over board games

Last weekend, I met up with some of the alumni of the lead organizers of our CSR organization at work. I say alumni because some of us have stepped down from our previous leadership roles and some of us have left. While not everyone was available, a lot of us were so we proceeded with the reunion since it's often impossible to get many of us together at the same time and place.

We had discussed having a game day/night in the past because a lot of us in the group were board game fans so this was a perfect time for us to enjoy the games I purchased a while back. Denise arrived before everyone else - I actually hadn't seen her in maybe more than a year since she missed our karaoke night late last year - so since everyone else wasn't there yet, we got to catch up quite a lot. Kristel soon joined us about an hour and a half after Denise arrived so I ordered some pizza and mojos from Shakey's and I then took out my first game, Ticket to Ride. I thought it would be a good game for us to start with given there were only three of us at that time. Of the three games I have, this is probably the easiest one to understand. :) Also, I've now had this game for 2 1/2 years but I hadn't been able to play it yet. By the time the three of us finished our game, the rest of the folks started arriving in quick succession - Melody, Katco, Lou, Zaza, Diane, and Jef. At that point, the food arrived as well so we had a dinner break before resuming play.

Since our Ticket to Ride board was already set up, we decided to play one more game. Katco also brought games with her and she also had Ticket to Ride (albeit the Europe version) so we decided to have two boards set up so all of us could play (this game can only allow up to 5 players). Once we were done, we moved to the more complicated 7 Wonders. The entire first game was spent explaining it to people LOL but after dealing with the difficulty of understanding how you can score points, people started to get the hang of it. We played one more round after - a much easier round for everyone this time - before calling it a night. We all seem to agree to stage another game day/night but we also thought that people should start arriving earlier to maximize the number of games we can play. I figure that, with all the enjoyment we had, I should organize these game day/nights more regularly.