This was a short night– real life clipped both ends short. We got in a game of Ticket to Ride and a couple of quick games of For Sale.
Ticket started out with Ben and Jennifer springing from Denver, heading south and east from there. I had Pheonix-Portland and Salt Lake-Calgary, so I ran a strange route: Pheonix-Denver-Helena-SLC-Portland-Seattle-Calgary. Everyone looked at me very strangely for that route…
Meanwhile, Emily was laying Canadian rail and Dad was building up a hand of cards but not playing much. He finally started, running a Portland-Los Angeles rail. The center was getting tangled; Em, Ben, and Jennifer had a knot of trains through the South and midwest. A few new tickets encouraged me to head east, so I dove into the mass, heading east to Nashville on the last mid-country east-west track. Once I got to Nashville, the tycoon card encouraged me to head to the Atlantic, but most of the coast was double tracked (by Emily and Ben in the north, generally in the south).
We were all running low on trains, and soon Em brought us to end game. We counted up and Dad’s tickets propelled him to victory. We were pretty spread out in points, though a swing in longest train (from Dad to Em or me) would have changed the winner. Ben and Jennifer both completed their tickets, but the low point value of their N-S tickets and the low value of the midwestern connections (lots of 1 & 2 length segments) kept them behind.
Next we played For Sale. It was new to Em and unfamiliar enough to Ben adn Jennifer that we ran through the rules. They turned around and did very well, while I did horribly… not on house acquisition, but on collecting checks.
We played another round and had fun; I improved from 4th to 2nd, but the scores were very tight. An excellent game– fun and quick.
While that wasn’t a lot of gaming, people were already starting to fade, so we called an end to the evening early.