Session: Ticket to Ride: Mystery Train, Big Boss

Last night's sessions were noteworthy enough to report on.

For Ticket to Ride: Mystery Train we had five players. I went first and kept two tickets: Duluth-Houston and Sault St. Marie-Oklahoma City, which overlap. I then decided to try something I hadn't tried before, and immediately drew more tickets. I got the Station Manager, an expansion card that offers a 10 point bonus for connecting to the most cities by the end of the game with no penalty for failure, so I kept that. I also drew Seattle-New York, one of the game's biggest tickets. Since a number of juicy 6-routes can be used to complete this route, I kept it.

Before long everything went fubar. Michael adopted his frequent approach of grabbing 6-routes, claiming Seattle-Helena and Helena-Duluth. Meanwhile, a party broke out in the Great Lakes as all three other players began snapping up routes in that region like hotcakes. The unexpected crowding of that section of the board created a bit of a panic. Through all of this I'd been collecting cards, trying to put together some kind of viable route across the north. Then Mark poached the Sault St. Marie-Duluth connection I'd been counting on, but which I'd foolishly left vacant. That oversight ultimately cost me the Duluth-Houston ticket. A frenzied westward rush ensued, as two of us tried to connect to the Pacific Northwest while another built north from L.A. and angled for a route east.

I've never seen a Ticket to Ride game with as much unintentional hosage as we had here. I spent the entire game tensed up, trying to keep my route options as open as possible while securing what legs I could in my desperate bid to claim my big ticket. I finally managed a tortuous route: NY-Montreal-Toronto-Sault St. Marie-Winnipeg-Helena-Denver-Salt Lake City-Portland-Seattle, with a Seattle-Calgary leg thrown in for good measure (meant to connect back to Winnipeg, but thwarted immediately upon claiming it-- rendering that leg utterly useless to me except insomuch as it also hosed two opponents). Against all expectations, instead of connecting Sault St. Marie to Oklahoma City via the double-wide wild N-S run, I took the long way around and connected from Denver. I managed to snag the longest route by one train, offsetting my missed ticket, and nabbed the Station Agent bonus with my last singleton play to win by a slim margin over Michael.

There was much more ticket-drawing in this game, partly due to curiosity about the expansion tickets and partly because people got so hosed early on that they were desperate for salvation. I loved the tension in this game, and wonder if future plays would be enhanced by forcing everyone's first turn to be a ticket draw. The game experience is dramatically different when you've got difficult goals to attain. The dismay everyone felt as the board snarled up was fantastic, forcing us to improvise and find alternate solutions. Great stuff, and if the game was always like this I'd be playing it much more.

We gained a sixth player for Big Boss and saw something new: when the deck ran out, Mark was down to only three cards and had to pass. He had thirteen shares of stock (average is ~9) and a flag, and his shares were in pretty good companies-- so if nothing became a cash cow at 50 and his passing was therefore not as big a handicap, he looked to be a contender. As it turned out, a couple of us held most of the confining cards as long as possible, so in the end only two companies merged and the most valuable was worth 40. Despite his five or six passed turns Mark seemed in the running. Unusually for Big Boss, nobody was the obvious runaway leader. Sensing that scores would be close, we decided to count off our cash instead of simply announcing. Everyone took their cash in hand and counted off 100. Then another 100. Then another. Then 50. Then 10, etc. until the player's cash ran out and they declared their total. Mark was the 2nd player out at ~350. At 390 Damon dropped out with 389, leaving just me and Nate. I slapped down a 5, Nate did the same. I added a 1, and Nate matched. Then I grimaced and held up my empty hands-- I was out. Nate laughed and opened his hand, showing me... air. He was out, too-- we tied at 396! An amazing finish, with incredibly tight scores. In fact, as my last play I merged Panthera and Solitude and decided to assign the merging block to Panthera, since I had only one share of the Solitude. I almost went the other way anyway, to make the accounting easier and have Solitude pay out at 10 instead of 9. But Nate had four Solitude, and had I gone for the lazy accounting Nate would have won by three bucks! As with Ticket to Ride, this was a tense game. The drama of the slow reveal of the final tally was terrific.

Posted by Peter at January 26, 2005 02:29 PM