Tuesday night - Dinner with my parents

It was my father's birthday last week, and Kristin and I couldn't make it back to Illinois to celebrate with the family. We took the opportunity to invite my parents (Jon and Cindy) out here for dinner, and they were gracious enough to make the drive.

After a bountiful meal, we decided to take a walk around town. Our visitors were curious about the tornado damage, so we took them down to the park, then up Iowa Avenue, and back on Governor. I hadn't been in that area too much myself, and there is still quite a bit of damage to be repaired. We all were impressed by the devastation, coupled with the relative lack of damage to some adjacent properties.

When we got back, we broke out the cake Kristin had baked earlier, and sat down for a game. My parents aren't gamers, but every once in a while I can convince them to try something out. They must have been in a pretty good mood last night, because they were ready to go. I gave them a choice between Ticket to Ride and Through the Desert, and Mom picked TtR, because she, apparently, likes trains.

We passed out tickets, and everyone kept only two, except me. I had Duluth/El Paso, and Chicago/Santa Fe, which go together very nicely, and Seattle/New York, which is just a very hard ticket to give up. I decided to keep them all, and go for it (a philosophy which hasn't served me very well in the recent past, but makes for an interesting play). This was 41 points worth of tickets, which is quite a large amount, just starting.

The newbies seemed to grasp the rules pretty well, and Dad led for much of the first several turns. The scoring remained fairly close all through the mid-game. My father seemed very prone to taking locomotives, and used them often, completing routes fairly quickly. As we entered the midgame, my strategy of going from the SW, up along the W coast, and then straight across to link up in Duluth via the yellow and rust 6-routes was crumbling with each passing turn. I had all 6 yellows, but was stuck on 3 rust, and just couldn't seem to get any more, as people had gotten on to me taking it and were scooping it up. So, I took an alternate route, worth far fewer points, but much easier to do, comprised of small, grey routes that run down through Kansas and Oklahoma.

I ended up completing my tickets, triggering the endgame (while everyone else still had several cars left), and getting the longest route. The scoring was pretty close, although I was in the lead, before revealing tickets. However, my tickets ended up being worth 20+ points more than everyone elses, and I cruised to victory by over 20 pts..

Everyone had fun, and my father even seemed sort of interested in playing again. Perhaps his recent Sudoku fixation has given him more of an appetite for games and puzzles. This fun, relatively fast, session has helped to keep Ticket to Ride high up on my list of games to play with non-gamers. It also brought out one of the weaknesses for first time players - being able to gauge how many points you need in tickets by looking at what others are doing.

GG, GL