Blue was delayed by washing machine shenanigans and Green by pancakes, so while Burgundy, Black and Purple were entertained by food, Red and Magenta distracted them with a few quick rounds of Love Letter.  Magenta took the first two rounds winning the second by drawing the princess as the penultimate card; the third round went to Black when he played a Prince and asked Purple to discard her card which turned out to be the Princess.  With the arrival of Green and Blue had finishing her pancakes, we decided to play our “Feature Game” which was Ticket to Ride and its variants.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Which variant was the subject of some debate as we had all played different versions and everyone wanted to try a different one.  For example, Blue had never played the original USA version, but all those that had didn’t want to play again; similarly while Green was interested in playing Märklin, Black and Purple weren’t keen; they were interested in Switzerland or Nordic Countries, but Magenta, Blue and Green were unenthusiastic about that.  And so it went on, in fact, the only thing everyone agreed on was that we should split into a three and a four and nobody wanted to play Europe edition (as everyone had played that a lot). In the end, the group of three was based round Black and Purple who wanted to play with the Switzerland map and setup, and were joined by Burgundy who was fairly flexible.  That left the group of four who decided to go for Nederland as none of them had played it before.

– Image by boardGOATS

The basic Ticket to Ride game can be summarised as follows:  players take it in turns to carry out one of three possible actions and when one player has two pieces left or fewer, everyone gets one more turn before the game ends and points are tallied.  The first action is to lay trains on the map, but in order to do this, they must spend train cards in the colour featured on the map.  Thus, if a player wants to claim a four car route, they must play four cards of the corresponding colour and finally place four of their plastic carriages on the board in the correct location scoring points as they do so.  If they do not have cards to claim the route they want then they can, instead, choose two cards, either from the five face up cards next to the board, or from the face down draw pile.  “Laying trains” scores points, but a large number of a player’s points are scored at the end through tickets which give points to players that have connected several short routes together to connect two more distant cities.  Each player starts the game with some tickets (chosen from a larger number), but on their turn may, instead of drawing cards or claiming routes, draw more tickets.  At the end of the game, tickets which have been successfully completed score points, while unfulfilled tickets score negatively.

– Image by BGG contributor stormrover

Although this is a fairly complete summary of the rules for the original base game, each different version has slight modifications and variations that change the game slightly.  The “Swiss trio” got under way first as Burgundy was quite familiar with the rule modifications:  tunnels, ferry routes and country-to-country tickets; locomotive cards can only be used for ferries and tunnels, but can be drawn from the face-up cards without penalty.  The game was very close with Purple trying to make a long route from east to west, Black travelling north to south and Burgundy doing a bit of both. The tunnels were a bit of a hindrance with everyone struggling to get through the Alps without paying extra.

– Image by boardGOATS

As the ticket scoring came to a close, Burgundy had his nose in front and looked to have the win in the bag, but carefully counting up the trains gave Black the bonus for the longest route and with it, the win by just two points.  Burgundy was particularly cheesed off as he had attempted to claim a tunnel on his final turn that would have given him the longest route, but the fates conspired against him.  It was only later that we realised that there hadn’t been a recount for the points awarded as trains were placed on the map and as, invariably points tend to get missed out, a recount is generally sensible.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, Blue, Green, Red and Magenta had worked out the rules changes applicable to Nederland.  There are no ferry routes or country-to-country tickets and obviously, no tunnels, however, in this low-country with countless canals and rivers, there are bridges instead. and these have a toll.  Each player starts with “toll tokens” to a total value of thirty.  Most of the routes are double routes, so can be claimed by two different players, this feature is common with all other versions of Ticket to Ride when playing with the maximum number of players, but in this game they are used for all games.  The first player to claim a double route pays the marked toll to the bank, but the second player to claim that route pays the toll to the player who got there first.  These tolls become quite critical in the end game as there are bonus points available for players who manage to conserve toll tokens, and these bonuses are sizable with fifty-five points going to the player with the most tokens at the end of the game and thirty-five and twenty for second and third.  Players who can’t afford to build, can borrow from the bank, but that removes them from the race for bonus points as well as costing points at the end of the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

As is traditional, everyone began by moaning about where their starting tickets were.  Beyond that, nobody really knew quite what to expect, but it was clear that this wasn’t a game where players could ill-afford to hoard train cards and wait as they were likely to find themselves paying tolls to other players and giving them bonus points.  As such, everyone got going quickly and Red led the way placing several long routes giving her an early lead.  Everyone else caught up, and as players started to run low on trains, they realised they had to watch the number of toll tokens they had left else they would have to begin to borrow and that would put them out of the running for the bonuses.  Blue picked up extra tickets first, but they left her with a really tough decision as most of her track was in the north-west and the tickets she had were pretty much everywhere else.  After a very long time thinking, she decided to keep them all and go for broke.  The others soon followed, picking up more tickets, and Green had several goes with some corresponding to routes he had already claimed.  It was only a couple of turns after she had drawn her extra tickets that Magenta counted her trains and started to make some uncomfortable sounding noises suggestive of possible problems ahead.

– Image by boardGOATS

Blue triggered the end of the game and it was all too close to call with less than ten points between first and last before the tickets and bonus points were added on. Green was the first to count up and there was a stunned silence when we found he had a massive one hundred and thirty-seven points from the tickets to add to his train total of fifty-two.  Red had a couple of tickets that she had failed to complete so her ticket total took a bit of a bruising, but her problems were nothing to Magenta’s.  She only realised she didn’t have enough pieces to complete all her tickets when it was too late, so all her hard work to fulfil her initial tickets was almost completely negated as she finished with a ticket total of just one!  Blue had managed to complete all her routes and was pretty much neck-a-neck with Green which, like the other game, left it all down to the bonus points for toll tokens.  Red took the fifty-five points for the most remaining toll tokens, giving her a very respectable one-hundred and fifty-four and third place.  Blue picked up an extra thirty-five points and finished forty points ahead of Green who finished with the fewest toll tokens and therefore didn’t add to his score.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pine had appeared towards the end of the game and, after a brief explanation of the rules, had commented on the name of the game in German:  Zug um Zug, which translates to “step by step”, although Zug also means train.  This kind of double-entendre is not uncommon in Euro game titles and prompted a discussion of other games with similar “jokes”.  Blue mentioned Tier auf Tier which literally translates to the English title “Animal upon Animal”, a children’s game where players stack wooden animals, creating “tiers”.  Magenta brought up her favourite game, Bohnanaza, where “Bohn” is the German for bean.  Green chipped in with his offering of Citadels, which is called “Ohne Furcht und Adel” in German which literally means “without fear and noble” (colloquially translated as “without fear and nobility”).  This is actually a pun on “Ohne Furcht und Tadel”, which means “without fear or blemish”.  It is an old-fashioned expression seldom used now except perhaps when describing a perfect performance by Michael Schumacher for example, that refers to somebody being very valiant and chivalrous (ala King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table).  Interestingly, when trying to find the correct literal translation, Green submitted “Ohne Furcht und Adel” to Google and got “Citadels” in return, perhaps a measure of how embedded games are in German life.

– Image by BGG contributor dr.mrow

With eight of us, and nobody terribly keen to play anything too cerebral, we decided to go for something light, 6 Nimmt got a mention, but we settled on Las Vegas, using the extra dice for more players players and the wild cards from the Boulevard expansion, and the Slot Machine from the 2015 Brettspiel Advent Calendar.  This was a Christmas gift and had its first outing in January when it was the “Feature Game”, but as a light dice game that plays a wide range of player numbers it is quite versatile.  On their turn, each player begins by rolling their dice, then assigning some of them to one of the six casinos.  Each casino is numbered one to six and has a jackpot drawn at random from a deck of money.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor ckirkman

On their turn, players must use all the dice of one number to bet on the casino of that number.  Once everyone has placed all their dice the player who placed the most dice on a casino takes the highest value currency card. The really clever bit is that before any money is handed out, any “draws” are removed, which leads to a lot of barracking.  The Slot Machine is like a seventh casino, except that it can hold dice of any number, but each number can only be added once (though a player must add all the dice they have of that number).  The game was a lot of chaotic fun with with lots of chit-chat and before long we had worked our way through the card deck and spent an hour doing it.  Although there is a lot of down-time with so many players, it didn’t seem to matter very much and it was quite relaxing to chat about things.

– Image by boardGOATS

We found Slot Machine definitely added a useful extra option to the game, however, the “wild cards” were less interesting.  This inspired a discussion about the value or otherwise of expansions.  In an evening essentially devoted to expansions, it was interesting consider whether the addition of expansions took a simple game that everyone liked and made it unnecessarily more complex, or whether it breathed new life into a game people had become tired of.  In the case of Ticket to Ride at least, it was clear that with a game that players had become almost too familiar with, the extra maps provided a nice alternative.  Meanwhile, the game was providing an interesting background to the discussion and the end results were almost incidental.  Magenta redeemed herself after the disastrous ticket fiasco, finishing with $390,000 and third.  Second place went to Red with $420,000, but with her second victory of the night, Blue took home the bacon with $460,000, more than twice that of last place.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor joeincolorado

Learning outcome:  Germans *do* have a sense of humour!