I also had my first games group night recently (outside of a handful of occasions with a very small number of friends).
There were four of us at the table, and we played Sagrada, Ecosystem, Get Bit!, and Qwirkle.
I’d played Sagrada once before, but a long time ago, so I’d mostly forgotten it. It’s neat, and pretty, but I found it incredibly easy to accidentally make illegal moves when I hadn’t yet internalised all of the constraints (and checking that everyone is playing correctly seems like it would be difficult to do, although we had such an eagle-eyed player who did a very good job of this). When you’re waiting for your turn to come around, you know exactly which die you want and where you’ll put it if no one else takes it, and yes! it’s still there when your turn comes, so you grab it and place it, and someone says “you can’t do that”… that’s quite frustrating (especially because you then slow the game down by rethinking your turn). It’s not that this never happens in other games, but it happened to me so many times in this one. I did still enjoy it, but I don’t think I’d buy it – other people might not suffer the same mental blocks that I did, but I’d rather not risk it.
Ecosystem is a card-drafting tableau-builder, where each type of card (which are animals and habitats) wants to be adjacent to particular other animals/habitats in your grid in order to get points; and you are penalised at the end if you fail to score points with at least one instance of each type of card you’ve played (for failing to satisfy that part of the ecosystem / food chain). There’s a fair number of card types each with their own requirements, so it’s not a small amount to take in, but it’s not overwhelming either. Nice and light, and I’d happily play this one again.
Get Bit! is a push-your-luck game about tactical swimming in order to keep at least one other player between you and the shark which is bringing up the rear (and which bites off the nearest limb at the end of every turn). The game comes with a miniature shark and “robot” swimmers with detachable limbs. It’s basically a quick funny filler with a great gimmick. In my hurry to refresh my memory I messed up one of the rules (somewhat impressive when there are so few of them), but it was still fun. Hopefully I’ll get it right next time.
Qwirkle was Scrabble with colours and shapes instead of letters. I enjoy most word games except for Scrabble (I don’t play it for the sake of the other players as much as for myself – my brain can’t do it, and I’ll always slow the game down, taking forever to come up with even poor words). As it happened, I didn’t enjoy Qwirkle either, even though I generally enjoy pattern-matching. Maybe there’s just something about this style of tile layout that I’m really rubbish at…