Ticket to Ride PC
The Ticket to Ride PC game has arrived. I ordered the game from Days of Wonder's online shop and it arrived today. The unpsectacular packaging was pretty much the first thing which caught my full attention when returning home from Basel, Switzerland. As luck would have it, I direcly went back to Switzerland: Ticket to Ride PC features Alan R. Moon's official map of Switzerland.
The installation went smoothly. Since the game contains several tutorials (one for each map and another one for the online gaming area), I decided to watch the Switzerland tutorial. It's a bit lengthy but explains the rules in great detail. I chose to play against a Dumbbot first. The image above displays the results: DumbBot scores 31, Naturelich 144. Praise the lord, what a start! Well, obviously the DumbBot played really bad and I took all the time in the world to adjust to the new map. In fact, during the next games, I decided to play against a LongBot and he was a little bit better. Playing the Bots allowed me to quickly get a pretty good idea of possible strategies on the new map. And, of course, this map is *totally* different than any other Alan R. Moon Ticket to Ride game. Tunnels everywhere (who would have guessed?)... Short routes and a whole lot of transit-related tickets (connecting countries with other countries or Swiss cities with countries). It offers a whole new set of strategic opportunities, although it's too early for me to really judge, right now.
After I had finished playing the first few rounds I wanted to play an online game. I iniated a new game, but no one joined. It obviously caused some confusion in the chat and it appears you cannot join a game, if you don't own the PC game. Well, here I am willing to play this great game I was looking for so badly and then there is nobody to play with? Is everyone at sleep already, or am I like the first person to try this? Come on, Days of Wonder, you must be kiddin' me: I pay €24.95 for the new map of Switzerland and have nobody to play against except some DumbBots? I can't even play it like a regular board game.
I better stop ranting now. It's probably the lack of sleep over the last week, anyway. Keep your fingers crossed for Saturday and Sunday. I have some terrible studying ahead of me and definitely need a few breaks every now and then...