All right, it took me a month, but here come the first photos.

Happy meetup on the first day after I arrived by train from Germany to Vienna.
From left to right:
Ramond, Simon, Peter, Georg a.k.a. geoo.
For the first week and a half, I stayed at Peter's. I gave him this big box of marzipan goodies for his hospitality. Thanks, Peter, for hosting me! This kind of marzipan, Niederegger, is a German speciality. It's a fine gift for Christmas. But because September worked best for us, we had the treat ahead of the season.
RAMBots is a robot-programming game for 4 players with Icehouse pieces.
Rules for Rambots
Very hard! If you put larger pieces in your program, you get more work done per round, but other people's smaller pieces will execute before your large pieces do. By then, the board won't necessarily be what you expect it to be.
The interplay of different people's programs is chaotic by nature, but there is no luck involved. If you guess exactly what other people "wrote", you know exactly what will happen and can take advantage. It's rare to successfully take advantage of that, but it's magnificent when you nail it.

Learning game of
Twilight Imperium 4 (TI4) with Ramond and Peter. Both of them had played before. I promised Peter to learn one whopping game, and we agreed on TI4. I've read the rules beforehand, but it still took this practice game to drill home the nuances. You
- amass plastic space fleets (fun),
- send your plastic to war against other people's plastic (fun fun fun),
- roll dice to resolve battles (exciting, ask IchoTolot for how that goes with me),
- and play overpowered randomly drawn event cards on each other (frowning grumpy Simon).
My main criticism of TI4 involves these cards. But that's a topic for future blog posts; short version: I prefer games where I understand the full design, know all possible things that can happen, know all probabilities, and can decide all rules corner cases, even if it's a lot of work to learn it all.
Lots of direct confrontation, lots of diplomacy, lots of rules lawyering. You have be able to take a beating from an opponent and then still plan constructively in the future with the same opponent. Played to conclusion, it takes the whole day.
Look how happy Peter is in the photo: He successfully talked me into attacking Ramond's purple fleet, and Peter's green pieces aren't involved.
Peter has the luxury of knowing enough people in Vienna to arrange complete 6-player TI4 games. We played one during my stay (me, Peter, and 4 other friends), but didn't take photos of it. If I ever come back, I'm sure he'll reel me into another one, and I'll be happy to join.
I'm a big board gamer, I wonder how many other folks on here are, too.
I too believe we have many forumers who play, and merely don't talk about it much.
Here in Germany, IchoTolot has been over the most, both for shorter games, and for two-day slogs of Axis & Allies Global 1940. Georg is happy to play shorter games.
Soon: More photos, more games, fancy dinners, and cute animals from the zoo.
-- Simon