I was unable to attend most of game night last week, so I was really excited when Gwen and I again found some time for playing a few games this weekend!  On Friday evening, we pulled out a little stack of games and worked our way through most of them.  We started off with a game of Cartagena, which is both one of my favorite fillers and favorite race games.  Despite all the luck of the card draws, I consistently see people that have experience with the game and use solid strategy winning the game.  As we got into this one, my tactical play was a little cleaner than Gwen's, and I won 6-4. 

When we tried another game on Saturday night, things didn't go so well.  We were both tired and Gwen was especially distracted by the baby, so I won 6-1 and nobody had much fun.  Learn from me, people, and remember that it's better to just stop a game that isn't going well than to play it out and extend the suffering.  That aside, let's jump back to Friday night when we had a lot more fun!

After Cartagena, we pulled out the game that turned Gwen into a boardgamer and helped reignite my love for this side of the hobby game community, Ticket to Ride.  We pulled out the 1910 expansion as well, and played first with the "mega game" rules (using all of the ticket cards from the expansion).  Despite me claiming the Seattle-Portland link early and making Gwen take the (very) long way around, she completed way more tickets and won the game by 20 points or so.

Not getting our fill of little plastic train cars, we reset the board and shuffled the cards back up.  I suggested that we try using just the "Big City" cards from the expansion (which I don't think we'd ever done before) and give that a try.  I built a mostly North-South route from Houston through Atlanta and then up to Chicago and New York while Gwen did more of the East-West thing from San Francisco to Raleigh.  In an almost total reversal of our fortunes, I completed a dozen or so tickets to claim the victory.

Now, I'm going to get a bit serious here, so I hope you don't mind.  In addition to the "gamery" significance that it has, Ticket to Ride also holds some less enjoyable history for us as well.  In our many years of attempting to have a child, our path took us into the realm of in-vitro fertilization.  About a year and a half into that process (which was almost 2 years ago now), we actually had some success and got pregnant.  When Gwen was still just a few weeks along, we went away on a little weekend trip for our birthdays (June 16 and 18).  One of the things we took along with us was our copy of Ticket to Ride, which we were playing a lot at the time.  Well, on my birthday (the 16th), Gwen started to have some spotting.  We talked to our doctor, who told us to take it easy (the opposite of all the shopping and stuff we had planned), so we then spent pretty much the rest of our little vacation in the room playing more TtR.  This included, unfortunately, most of the day on Gwen's birthday (the 18th) when she also had the miscarriage.  

We still played Ticket to Ride occasionally, but for me at least, it has carried with it the spectre of that weekend ever since.  Now, however, on the other side of in-vitro and with our perfect little baby girl in our lives, I think that I can finally put a bit more closure onto the emotional scars I have from that experience.  Instead of a reminder for the little one we lost and the other 31 embryos that didn't make it, maybe Ticket to Ride can just be a regular game again... 

Okay, seriousness is over now; back to the games!  Gwen is still just in love with Qwirkle, so we pulled it out next.  I pulled out to a big early lead, but then hit a dry spell that let her catch back up and even tie me at one point.  Through sheer, dumb luck I pulled a tile three turns from the end that could complete a Qwirkle and give me the lead for good, however.  There's a lot of tactical play involved with this game, but with relatively evenly-skilled players luck seems to almost always make the difference, which annoys me a bit at times.  It's still fun, though, and as long as Gwen likes it I'm sure I'll play it a lot.

To finish our evening we again challenged ourselves to a Heroic-level game of Pandemic (despite my declaration at the end of my last entry).  Playing it all by the book, Gwen pulled the Researcher while I got my "favorite" role, the Operations Expert.  Our initial infections were mainly in black and red, so I was aggressive early using cards to fly across the board where I could then place Research Stations to help us later.  Through Gwen's power, I managed to cure black early, but then probably spent a turn or two too long trying to eradicate it altogether, which proved futile.  Again working together, we kept the board under control while curing next red and then yellow as well.  As most of the games I play seem to do, we were then left with a blue disease that was fastly getting out of control.  With a lot of efficiency and a bit of luck in the special card draws, however, we managed to put together the cure and win yet another game!  That's 3-1 against the Heroic game!  Woo-hoo!!!