Ticket to Ride

We played a few games of Ticket to Ride during this week, as it was half term. We were in the Lake District, intending to get some big walks in, but a combination of low cloud and unwell children meant that the car space allocated to games was entirely justified.

I remember one particular game of Settlers of Catan that went like a dream from start to finish - every dice roll resulted in my fields producing, every trade was helpful and I reached the 10 VPs while every one else was in the 3 to 5 range. Well, one of these games of TtR went just like that. I retained two of my initial three routes - San Francisco/New York and Calgary/Salt Lake City - and started to collect cards. This was a five-player game. The eastern seaboard started to fill up quite fast, especially along the Toronto/Atlanta and Boston/Atlanta lines, but I held on in the hope that at least one or two of the routes into New York would remain open. Eventually, I started picking off some of the shorter routes, while holding on to cards which would buy the six-space routes in the north-west, relatively confident that no-one else was collecting these in more than twos or threes. Everything ran like a dream and I completed a single 45-train length route which zig-zagged all the way from San Francisco to New York. Very satisfying.

Tried a "beginner's" game of Sunda to Sahul. It's an odd game and quite difficult to play competitively. Particularly in a mixed adults/children group, there was a tendency to be co-operative and to try and help each other out. I know some players do this far more than I do - for example, I think my attitude to Carcassonne is more aggressive than many players like. I guess that the "advanced" options may be worth a look, but it kept seeming to me that this was little more than a giant jigsaw.