Saturday 30th April - Games Day hosted by Garry
Well we finally made it to Garry's for a whole days gaming. In attendance were Steve, Jo, Richard, Garry and myself. After everybody had arrived we had a load of games, many more than we could possibly play in one day. So, what to play first, Richard had purchased TTR Europe the day before and everybody wanted to give that a try first. Steve was the only one to have played before, but as we had all played TTR, we zoomed through the rules and off we went. We started at around 11.30. I had a bit of luck as 2 of my short routes branched off of my long route,nice! I concentrated on completing the long route first. A bit of a gamble as everybody can pretty well see where you are going. But most of it was double routes with only a couple of singles. And I always had the stations!! Anyway in the end I didn't need them and managed to complete it easily. You can see from the final pic that my routes were pretty much together, I am yellow. Whereas Steve's were fragmented quite a lot, and Richard's, Garry's and Jo's were all linked.
The tunnels and ferries give the game another dimension. Those tunnels especially, you have to have back-up cards or risk not completing it. Of course that gives the other players a chance to jump in and block you. I really enjoyed the game, better than vanilla TTR I think. Of course the result may have coloured my opinion. lol. I just pipped Richard to the win with the help of the longest route card. This took around 2 hours.
Final Scores
Colin 116, Richard 110, Jo 106, Steve 87, Garry 56
All in all we had a great day, thanks to Garry for hosting and Sally for putting up with some game geeks taking over her house.
posted by Colin @ 1:14 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Richard has pointed out that you can see his hand in this pic if you look closely. I didn’t look, honest guv!!
For those of you that don’t know I work for LloydsTSB as an ‘IT Chappie’, when I started work for the Bank I used to be based in Birmingham, however around 8/9 years ago I was relocated down to Sunny Sussex. Rather annoyingly just after I relocated a rather good games shop opened in Birmingham
(Waylands Forge). Luckily I still had reason (Meetings etc) to go back to Birmingham for work purposes – and obviously at the same time take the opportunity to do the rather long work upto Five Ways from the city centre to visit Waylands Forge and purchase a few games. Well that was up until about three years ago – when after a ‘project cancellation’ I had no reason to visit anymore.
Well all that was up until about 3 weeks ago when I was allocated to a new project that required me to visit the Bank’s Birmingham offices again – so prior to meeting last Friday I took the opportunity to visit visit Waylands Forge (Conveniently situated in a new shop in Fletchers Walk just the other side of Victoria Square from the Banks Offices – no more trudging upto Five Ways!!).
Anyway the upshot of all this is that I purchased a copy of Ticket To Ride – Europe which a brought along on Saturday. Perhaps rather unsurprisingly we chose it as our first game of the day.
Anyway enough of the explanatory waffle, my initial ticket deal was actually pretty good ( Basically the tickets meant I had to get from Lisbon to Smolensk via , Paris, Frankfurt & Danzig with a slight detour to Vienna. It soon became obvious that there was a chock point in the centre of the board (Paris/Frankfurt/Berlin) and I failed to get the Berlin/Frankfurt link down quick enough plus I had to detour away from the ‘main line’ to link Paris & Frankfurt ( In retrospect I think this was the game winning bit of track for Colin as he didn’t have to expend and stations to complete the link ). Also to top it all Joe used up all three of the links into Smolensk – which meant I had to use another station to complete this link.
The new other features of the game ( Tunnels & Ferries ) also had their effect, Tunnels meaning there is a degree of risk when trying to build certain rail routes – in fact Joe got caught more than perhaps the statistical norm when it came building his tunnels.
Realising that I was going to need extra tickets to stand a chance of winning I took some and got lucky with routes - I needed to connect my track to Venice & Zagreb – which despite taking a few risk with tunnels building I completed. Still thinking I needed more tickets to win I took another additional set – unfortunately the only route I could complete required a link to Dieppe and the only way I could do this was to utilise my last Station.
With final reckoning it was quite close and Colin took the win – but I think it is a game we all thought added a lot to the Ticket To Ride franchise and that we will have to play again soon.
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