Southern High School Gaming Club, Ticket to Ride

Thursday, October 12th

Mr. Kandah, the German teacher, runs the Southern High gaming club every Thursday afternoon. I've stopped by a couple of times to watch the kids play and chat with Mr. K. On Thursday, I got there early enough that I was able to join in on a game.

While Mr. K. and Jeremy were setting up Memoir '44, and Brandon was getting a game of Terra going, Eric was setting up Ticket to Ride, and needed some players. I sat down, and the table quickly filled up, although one player left again quite quickly, as he had band practice.

Ticket to Ride

I was playing with Eric, Derek, and David. All but Derek had played before, although it seemed that they had several of the rules wrong. First, they hadn't been subtracting incomplete tickets from scores in the endgame. Also, they'd been under the assumption that you had to reveal completed tickets, and complete all the tickets you currently had, before drawing new tickets. I don't know where these ideas came from, but I ended up sort of re-teaching the game to them as we went along.

I had one of the strongest tickets - the 20 point LA to Miami, in my opening hand, and also kept the ten point Miami to Toronto, getting rid of a ticket in the Northwest that I didn't think I'd probably have enough cars to complete. The young men I was playing with actually played quite well, making good decisions about drawing cards. They did place a little to high of a value on locomotives, I think, and tended to draw off the top maybe a little too often. That said, they were out and taking routes very quickly. They were rushing to two and three car routes, though, and not scoring a lot. I was the last to claim a route, and jumped from worst to first by claiming the six black route, just edging Eric, who was at 14.

We had a little discussion about the varying values of the connections, and planning your ticket completion to include longer routes, as well as keeping an eye on continuity for the purpose of gaining longest route. As I continued to claim the long routes across the bottom, I think the boys started to appreciate these ideas, as I started to run way out in front.

I ended up triggering the game end, taking a four space route, the only cars not connected to my other routes, and going to zero cars. The other players finished up, and we scored. Everyone had done a good job, and completed all of their tickets. I think David actually had about 39 points in tickets, but it wasn't enough to catch up with me, especially with longest route. I think I ended up with 138 or so, with David in second, a ways behind me. Eric had third, and Derek ended in fourth, although he did quite well for his first game.

We cleaned up the game, and it was about time to quit, as Mr. Kandah had to leave early. He did have to wait for the Memoir game to get over, though, so I started to teach San Juan to him and Eric. We just got through the explanation when the M44 game ended, much quicker than we had thought it would. Hopefully, we'll get a game in at a future meeting.

There aren't a lot of after-school activities at Southern, aside from athletics (and there aren't even many sports teams, really - only football and volleyball right now). Mr. Kandah is to be commended for volunteering his time. The group of students is well organized, and seems to grow each Thursday, as more kids become aware of the group. It's nice to be able to do something fun with the kids outside of class.

GG, GL
JW