Last night our game club Fenland Gamers held another virtual game night.
We had a new (not new to the club) member join us for the virtual game night, so I added their Asmodee username to my Asmodee friends list. I do this through the Asmodee web page. It’s easier and quicker that way. It does make sending game invites a lot simpler if folks are in your friends list. Once that was done, it was deciding what to play based on the overlap between the apps everyone owned. Which was either Carcassonne or Ticket to Ride (TTR). There were other overlaps but not for everyone.
Our game for the evening was Asmodee digitals TTR. I’ve not played the TTR app in years, and even then it was just me against the AI. So it was a first for me to be playing it online. I definitely needed to remind myself of the interface. The last time I had played any version of the physical TTR was the New York version in 2018. The original TTR I last played in 2017, and the TTR UK was 2016 on 18th March. Literally a day short of being a full on 5 years to the day!
We started off playing the original base game of TTR because I didn’t know what expansions everyone had. Which I needn’t have taken into account. It was pointed out over discord during play that only one person (the one starting the game) needed to have the expansion.
I wasn’t doing amazing in the first game, I put that down to getting back into the swing of things. Even though I didn’t win, I wasn’t last, and scored more points than Jonathan.
The second game was using the TTR UK map. I think out of the versions of TTR that I have played so far over the years, this is one of my favourite maps to play. I like the having to purchase technology to open up various parts of the map, get extra points for competing routes etc.
One annoying thing did happen right at the end when I was going to share the detailed results for the TTR UK map. It crashed! And every attempt since to go back into the game (not the app) to get those results sees the app crash. So Jonathan kindly sent me the images you see above. Sadly the UK map does not show the completed routes at the end of the game. It’s the board state just as before I trigger the end of the game and the final round. But it does show that I got the New York route that was worth a massive 40 points plus the bonus points I had from the technology cards.
Despite that app crash at the end I think that the combination of using official app versions of a game along with discord for voice/text chat works really well, especially if using a tablet device. My experience with the virtual tabletop apps hasn’t been great. Especially their iOS versions. Nope for me official app version on the iPad, and use my iPhone with headset plugged running the discord app for the chat. Works a treat.
Anyway we all had a good time. That’s the important part.
I was punished for taking that last group of tickets in the first game – I was getting greedy. All three were far too difficult to achieve in the time left or were impossible to complete. I had to keep one, so I opted, naturally for the ‘easiest’ ticket to complete (but as mentioned, it was going to be a hard task to do). I ended up losing 17 points on that ticket.
I kept getting ‘kicked’ from the game! Thinking that something must be wrong with the tablet version, I ended up turning on my laptop to find out that it was actually an erratic internet connection. I sorted that out and had no further problems using the tablet.
One of the amusing things (or confusing things, depending on how you look at it), was that the colours are not identical across all player devices. So, the laughter from everyone that I was not playing yellow, was short lived when I revealed that according to my interface, I was. This was confusing when I asked a rhetorical “Who’s playing blue”, knowing it was Darren, only to be told that it was Oli. I think this is when it dawned on us all that each device was showing different colours for the players. For example, on Darren’s USA end game state photo above, the purple trains belonged to me, but on my screen these trains were all yellow and Darren’s red trains were showing as blue for me!
I was not a fan of the UK map when I first played it (I was in the aforementioned game 5 years ago with Darren and my two nieces), but found it not too bad last night (after a bit of a refresher as to how things worked). I made a blunder when I took my last grasp for points (by taking tickets) and then keeping a ticket that I mistakenly thought I already had a connection too and had completed (I mistook the connection to Southampton as a connection to Reading) and it cost me 5 points. Not enough to even mount a challenge, Darren had already secured the win by a stunning 40 point connection from Southampton to New York, but a mistake nonetheless.
A very good evening of gaming with some great company :)