Tuesday July 27th - Ticket to Ride

Attendees for an outing of this year’s Spiele de Jahre winner were: Steve, Garry, Neil, Natalie, Colin.
I only found out that it was my choice when I checked my emails in the morning, so not having a game with me I had a quick think of what everybody else had a copy of. Ah, Ticket to Ride, that sounds good, I know Garry has a copy so a rapid email to get him to bring his copy along and we’re all set.
The most experienced traveller we decided was Steve who had been to Melbourne. So he started, I had 3 reasonable tickets and decided to keep all three. I got a couple of good routes in early and took an early lead. Garry was steadily collecting train cards and did’nt get on the score track for a while. But then, Bam, a hefty 6 trainer and 15 points and he was off. Natalie got blocked off a couple of times and consequently found it difficult to complete her tickets. The game proved to be very close and before you know it somebody is down to one or two cars and you only have one turn left. Surprisingly nobody took any extra tickets in this game, concentrating I think after completing their tickets to just grabbing the biggest routes they could.
The final score was extremely close with Garry and Neil tieing for the lead and both having two completed tickets, the win went to Garry with the longest completed train.

Final Scores
*Steve 96 Garry 109 Neil 109 Natalie 77 Colin 98 (*Starting Player)

Ratings (0-10)
Colin 8.5

That only took just over the hour so with some time left we decided to give the Ark of the Covenant a quick run.
I think this is the simplest of all the Carcassonne variants, to encourage more family play perhaps. Anyway, A few large cities started to grow and I couldn’t seem to get in any of them. The Ark was moving fairly regularly garnering a steady stream of points for everybody. A couple of large fields emerged, luckily I managed to get in one of them. Garry scored a couple of temples and had an easy win. I only had one meeple on the board at the final scoring, but the points I made during the game surprisingly gave me second spot.

Final Scores
*Garry 80 Steve 57 Natalie 56 Colin 62 Neil 57 (*Starting Player)

Ratings (0-10)
Colin 6.5