We had a great weekend, gaming at a youth hostel near Telford - and I played three games that were new to me.

Wyrmspan is a variant of Wingspan, only with dragons instead of birds - and it turns out theming makes a big difference to me when it comes to games. Or at least - I had it in my head that I didn't really like Wingspan, but my review from playing it for the first time in 2020 says otherwise... Anyway, I really enjoyed Wyrmspan, even though we didn't finish playing until after 1am... It's a game where you have to collect resources to obtain dragons and then place them in your caverns in such a way that they combine to provide you with more resources and points. It's a good combination of sort-of worker placement and pattern matching that really appeals to me - and the art is gorgeous!

I also played another game that's linked to one I know well - Quacks & Co: Quedlinberg Dash, which sits in the same universe as Quacks of Quedlinberg, but is a very different game. It's much simpler, as it's designed for kids and is a fairly straightforward racing game, rather than the push-your-luck style of the original. It's very cute, though, with great art, fun characters to play (I was the donkey) and a certain amount of strategy in building a bag of tokens that will work well to advance your piece in the race. Not very challenging, but a lot of fun.

But my favourite new game of the weekend was a card game dating back to the 1930s, called Plus and Minus. Each player has a mat with spaces for the numbers 1 to 25 and you have to get each of your four pieces from the top to the bottom in order to win the round. You do that by playing a card from your hand and adding its value to the one played by the person before you. If you end up moving a piece further than 25, it has to go back to the start. We played five rounds and I didn't do particularly well, but I really enjoyed it and would love to play again.