Last night saw Jonathan and I visiting the pad of Debbie and Jo to play a “marathon” play session of Ticket to Ride. Ok not so much a marathon because Debbie was catching a bus to Kings Lynn at 10:30 to sign fans autographs.

In the meantime our evening of trains geekery kicked off with a game of Ticket to Ride Europe.

Once more I was faced with an upside down map of Europe. My tickets seemed to fit together okish.

During our game play there was plenty of banter and laughter. And somehow I was completing tickets! What was funnier not until I was nearly out of trains did anyone notice I was getting to that point!

Finally scoring and I had won! My first physical game win in a long time.

Our next Ticket to Ride map was the latest one released the UK. None of us had played this map before.

For the UK map they introduced technology cards. Cards that you had to buy so that you could do things like create ferry routes, or create routes in Scotland (or Wales, Ireland and France), or create routes that required three and four cards to build.

I liked this addition to the game. Remembering you needed them before making a turn did slow one or two of the others.

My initial starting tickets were interesting, I don't think I had one worth more than five points. Plus I had a one point route I could complete straight away!

With lucky draws I was able to get the technology cards I needed to be able to complete my tickets. Then I started holding the cards needed to get the technology that would make each completed ticket worth two extra points.

After getting that I was trailing on the score board. But there was a way to catch up and go into the lead. Sitting on the board was a massive forty points in the form of a ten card route to New York. So I went for that. No one else was going for it.

I think it came as a surprise when I played that route and jumped massively into the lead. I was waiting for the “that's over powerful” comment.

By the time I had scored that massive route, I was within striking distance of triggering the end game. The others still had lots of trains in front of them. So that's what I did, I went for routes that would allow me to trigger the end game as quick as possible.

After the final counting I had won again.

As I said I loved the technology cards. At the start of the game with such short routes I was wondering how anyone could get to one hundred points. Were the designers being optimistic? But at the final count I ended up with ninety nine points. I was even pleasantly surprised that there were route cards worth over ten points.

We finished up our evening playing a couple of games of Codenames. Our teams were split up as boys against girls. Both games were won by the boys. I think this was the first time I've played where I also got to guess from the clue.

Another great evening of gaming, and I had a clean sweep of wins ^___^

Posted by me using my iPad and the Blogsy app