Ticket to Ride

My neighbor got me hooked on a game called Ticket to Ride. It's a board game that also has an online version as well as a version you can play with just cards. Anyway, when I want to "not think", I play TTR. It is made by a company called Days of Wonder. Here's the description of the game from their site:

Ticket to Ride is a cross-country train adventure in which players collect and play matching train cards to claim railway routes connecting cities throughout North America. The longer the routes, the more points they earn. Additional points come to those who can fulfill their Destination Tickets by connecting two distant cities, and to the player who builds the longest continuous railway.

I don't know why, but I fell in love with this game. There is some strategy to it but it's not very complex. It's just simple, fairly mindless fun. I play online mostly because it's easier to find people to play with that way. Even at 2am here, I can find somebody logged in and ready to play from half-way around the globe where it's late afternoon. You gotta love how small the internet makes the world!

Anyway, here's my latest game board after I won:


I'm the green trains. I made it from Vancouver all the way across the country to New York, then down to Atlanta and finally Charleston.

Gee...if I'd flown all that way, it would've taken me the better part of today to get there. As it is, I just spent 20 minutes crossing the country and never left my chair in front of my trusty MacBook Pro.

Now, if somebody would just figure out how to make real travel that easy, I'd be really happy!