Some early notes on Aif Achse, El Grande, Blindes Huhn, David & Goliath, and Cafe International. At my games group night this week we tried out several new games. We ran El Grande up through the first scoring round for instructive purposes only, as with six players present we were one over the limit. It looks very interesting, but we'll only know whether it's any good or not once we have a solid familiarity with all the action cards that might come up. Hopefully we'll become as fascinated as many reviewers have been, and this will be "a good game of penny-pushing," as my subconscious blurted out while we were putting it back in the box.

El Caballero has been set aside until we want a sequel to El Grande.

Blindes Huhn was too much like Hearts, and the tactical challenge of arranging your cards since play must be from one end of the hand or the other on every trick turned out to be relatively trivial, so we didn't care a whole lot for this one.

David & Goliath was much more interesting, though we only had time for two hands. I apparently came out the winner even though I kept not being able to do what I was trying to do! So knowledge of the correct winning strategy is presently elusive, and I expect we'll have some fun nailing it down.

Three of us stayed for a late game of Cafe International and found it enjoyable -- a little lightweight, but solid. The fact that all players' tiles are kept face up added well to the planning thinking element. Have you played this before? The rules (translated) say that "every tile placed must score" except at the very beginning, which would mean only the very first tile played does not connect up to another tile already played. The Spiel des Jahres entry, however, suggests that a couple can be played anywhere on the board at any time, even though only the second of those two tiles scores. We started the game using the first rule but found the possibilities so limited that we switched to the latter after about a dozen tiles played. But then it turned out that seats at the bar didn't fill up nearly as fast as I expected. So I'm really not sure which way is better or which way is what the rules really say. Any help?