The EPGS Ticket To Ride Tournament – August 15th, 2009

Writen by Ken Horan

After some delays the EPGS Ticket To Ride tourney finally took place at the August 15th meeting.  Ten people signed up for the tournament and after a brief discussion it was clear the majority of the participants favored playing two five player games with the winner and runner up moving onto a final round. With that, the players were randomly divided amongst the two preliminary games.

The game I was in had it's fair share of missed routes and it wasn't surprising that Brian, the only player who didn't miss any of his routes, won easily with 139 points. The battle for second place was a lot closer; both John Kerr and myself ended with 123 points.  Our games were an interesting contrast of styles; John completed a bunch of small routes while I made a few big routes and went after, and accomplished, creating the longest route.  In the 1910 version of Ticket To Ride, there are two bonuses given out: a 10 point bonus for longest route and a 15 point bonus for most tickets completed (John won this with six of seven complete routes).  Unfortunately for me, most tickets completed is also the tie-braker so John advanced and I was out.

Meanwhile, the other game was very curious.  Paul Lipton completed 93 points worth of routes on the board, 27 points more than his nearest competitor.  However, not only did he not win, he finished 62 points behind 4th place.  Paul was unable to complete any of his tickets, and after the final scores were tallied, he ended up with 21 points.  Had he not done so well with his routes he may have had a negative score, something which I have never seen in Ticket To Ride.  The game was won by Carl Brubaker with a score of 114 points.  Carl was successful in securing the longest route in his game which turned out to be the difference as he finished exactly 10 points ahead of Bart.   Interestingly enough, Bart had mentioned that he hadn't played the game in a long time before we had started. &It didn't prevent him from making it to the final table.

The final round also produced one very low score: John Kerr attempted to repeat his "multiple short routes" strategy.  It did not work as the game ended just before he could complete several routes - if I remember correctly he said he simple needed a 2-length route to complete the routes in question.  John's net loss for his tickets was 33 points, bringing him down to a total for the game of 31.  This game turned out to be a reversal of the first game for Carl and Bart as this time around Bart completed the longest route and Carl got the Globetrotter bonus.  After the final tallying was done, Carl emerged victorious with an amazing 152 points, 30 points ahead of second place finisher Brian.

Thanks to everone who played, and congratulations to Carl once again!