Ticket To Ride - German Game of the Year Winner for 2004

A couple of weekends ago, I introduced Carcassonne (German Game of the Year 2001) to a bunch of people. They enjoyed it and thought it was fun and boy oh boy, they picked up the 'screwing Ju' strategy really quickly. During our first game, these two guys were fighting over farm land (5 peeps vs 4 peeps in the end). At first I thought this weird. I mean, it's not intuitive to want to screw people over in these games is it??

Well, this weekend, I met up again with these fellow board gamers and one of the girls brought her collection. One of her games was called Ticket To Ride Europe. Basically, each player is given a set number of trains and one or more tickets which indicates two cities they need to connect by building train routes. For each turn, a player can build train routes or pick up coloured train cards - when they have accumulated enough of these coloured cards, they can build a train route between two cities if that train route has not been already built by another player. The game ends when a player's train supply has been depleted. I'm probably doing a really bad job explaining the basics but things get nasty when there are a lot of players and suddenly your routes start to interfere with another players routes. This game also consisted of serious "screwing" techniques - does this have something to do with the German Game of the Year award? It was no wonder these gamers picked up Carcassonne so quickly! They were already familiar with these strategies and tactics.

Anyhow, I enjoyed the game so much that I went out and bought it (a completely impulsive buy). I'm bringing it home for Christmas ;)