There’s a fellow in the office with an expansive collection of board games who periodically throws “board game nights”. Natasha and I were excited to attend our first game night yesterday! He had quite a collection out for people to pick through, but Natasha and I were itching to play two of them in particular:

Ticket to Ride

Credit really ought to be given to Madeleine, who first introduced us to this fun and intriguing train game that’s easy to learn but deceptively strategic. Madeleine had us play the European board, which is a little more friendly than the American map we played last night – we found ourselves competing for rails quite a lot and inadvertently (or intentionally?) blocking eachother routes a number of times. The gameplay mechanic is really simple – you collect coloured cards and then play them to lay down routes, bonus points going for long routes and connecting to your goal cities. We had the basics worked out in the first few minutes the first time we played. The visual aspect of the game is pretty great, too – the map looks especially nice when it’s covered in little trains winding around mountain passes and across the continent.

Modern Art

The second game we played was an art auction game – every player buys and sells cards (with garish, terrible tongue-in-cheek art on them) in the hopes that they’ll end up with some of the “valuable” pieces. The most popular pieces earn you the most money, but up until the last moments of any auction it’s difficult to tell who’ll walk away with the millions, and who’ll end up with garbage. The game is somewhat brilliant in it’s mechanic, but it’s -really- difficult to crunch the odds in your head and it’s not easy to explain the game to newcomers. I was only starting to understand the game in the final rounds, so unless you have a really good sense of the game (or statistics) the game is kindof an exercise in watching money change hands.

When I went online to find a picture of the game being played, I discovered that lots of people have customized their cards with actual art – clever! It might be more fun to trade Vermeers than terrible photoshop plugins.