I am getting better at paying attention to which colors I’m revealing, and which ones I’m keeping close to the vest. It was obvious when I started to get the hang of the face-down technique, the expert players would react by laying down trains much sooner, trying to draw me out to reveal what my plans are. Sometimes I’ll even troll them by focusing on colors that I don’t really need, such as snatching up yellow & black to make it look like I’m gunning for the L.A.-El Paso-OK City slingshot, when I really plan to build somewhere in the north.
What’s really frustrating me right now, however, is figuring out how in the hell other players manage to pick up so many damn destination tickets, esp. in the 1910 Mega expansion. Somehow they always end up with 10-12 completed tickets, no missed destinations, while I’m still struggling to complete my original three – how on earth do they do that??? Whenever I draw from the ticket deck, I’m more likely to be forced to choose between four destinations I have no hope in hell of completing, like big-money runs to Miami or Houston while I’m building a mainline from Vancouver to Montreal. Sometimes it makes me so :mad: I’ve got half a mind to simply give up on this game…
It sounds like you are playing long games where players get many turns. At game end, how many unused trains do you have left in supply, and how many card do you typically have left in hand? Are you claiming a lot of short routes (1,2, and 3 card routes?).
If others are making multiple destination draws and you aren’t, your opponents are using their turns more efficiently that you. They are refraining for drawing excess cards that they don’t use, they are laying longer routes to deplete supply faster on a per-turn basis, and other such optimizations.
It depends. Sometimes I run out of cards early and have to refill from the deck, and other times I’ve got a huge stack since I can’t draw the right color to save my life. As for long games, that’s mostly true – in fact, I often get the feeling that the other players are merely being polite and allowing me to finish at least one big route before game’s end. Which is cool and all, but at the same time extremely frustrating when I can’t seem to place higher than 3rd or rarely 2nd despite what I feel is solid play on my part.
It does seem as if long time players know which cities are more likely to share connections. In a game earlier today (which I actually won by one point) my worst ticket was Duluth-Houston, which I decided to work on first by routing through Dallas, Little Rock, Omaha, and later extending to Winnepeg, since I knew all those tickets at least existed. It paid off, in that each of my subsequent draws contained a ticket that was in easy reach or already connected…and didn’t betray the fact that I had also started with Portland-Nashville and Calgary-Nashville.
Still…I wish I knew how these players manage to avoid the dreaded late-game draw of four tickets to Miami…
You claim the Miami-XX route in mid-game. If you can’t get it, you abandon the attempt. It is sometimes strategically correct to abandon routes and destination tickets if the cost is too high.
Duluth-Houston is a marginal example of this. The most direct route requires 8 cards, and 5 turns to claim the routes. This is a 9 turn investment. For your trouble, you get 16 points, 8 for the routes and 8 for the destination ticket. However, consider that laying one 6 card route and one 2 card route also requires 8 cards, but only 2 turns to claim the routes. This is a 6 turn investment for 17 points. If you hold the Duluth-Houston destination ticket, but choose a random 6-2 route instead of the 2-1-2-2-1 route, you only net 9 points (after the destination ticket penalty) versus 16, but have left your opponents with potentially 3 fewer turns. Of course, collecting 6 of a color is more difficult than fulfilling a bunch of small grey routes. But it is not necessarily true that you should actively try to complete all your destination tickets. You have the balance the cost with the reward.
True, and I’m discovering that a strong strategy is to start with 3-4 mediocre tickets and wait to see where the battles are, then go to the deck for a big ticket connecting the corners of map where there’s little activity. I’ll also sometimes select one ticket as a “dump ticket”, one that I plan to ignore but might end up being useful later…Vancouver-Portland is a good example of this.
Well, the DUL/HEL gambit seems more effective in the 1910 Mega expansion, which adds a whole bunch of tickets along that corridor. It also gives you a strong backbone to launch an assault on the big coastal cities (from Omaha to Seattle is only two turns, so is OK City to L.A.) as well as creating a huge mess in the center of the map that other players have to work around. It’s definitely situational, though.
Question: as an experienced player, do you always have a good idea of how you are doing score-wise? I’m finding that part really difficult – there are games that I’ve won when I felt I was way behind, and (more commonly, I’m afraid) I’ve lost some games by going to the ticket deck late and having it backfire miserably, only to discover I actually had a commanding lead. How do you judge how well you are doing?
You do have to keep at least one. The thing is, if you have pretty good connectivity on the board, then there’s a decent chance that you’ll get one that’s already connected or can be connected easily. You might even get lucky and get several that are connected or can be, making the upside very high. The downside is that you’ve wasted a turn and you keep the lowest-scoring ticket.
The other way to think about it is that it’s a high-risk high-reward strategy. Even if the expected value of the strategy is slightly negative, it makes sense to play it if you’re trying to maximize the number of games you win rather than maximizing your average score. You’ll win the ones where it pays off well, and you weren’t going to win the other ones anyway.
Since it’s been a few days and after several games where I’ve finally figured out the basics of ticket-drawing strategy, I can concur – it’s all about making the right connections.
In a nutshell, some cities are far more likely to share connections with others. If your route takes you from L.A. to Chicago, try routing through Santa Fe because that’s a ticket. If you’re starting from Vancouver, try to pick up Denver. Don’t bother hoping to draw a Seattle/Atlanta ticket because it doesn’t exist; but Seattle/OK City does. Always try and hook up New York, Atlanta, Chicago or Los Angeles if you’re anywhere near them, because those cities possess very valuable tickets. Boston sucks; it does have tickets for Phoenix, Kansas City and Miami, but little else. And so on.
Also (maybe this is unique to the online version) there are other reason to draw tickets. Maybe your opponent is on a roll, and drawing from the ticket deck can break his rhythm. Maybe you just need a breather. And maybe you think your opponent is bluffing – if he’s got an unbroken line connecting Las Vegas, New York and Miami, checking the deck may reveal he’s bluffing.
(Almost feel like I’m giving away secrets of the Illuminati here.)
Ticket drawing is less risky in the 1910 Mega expansion where there’s lots and lots of tiny routes worth just a few points, which are easy to bury if you get a bum draw. The vanilla version is much more perilous – in fact, in that version, it’s best to never draw new tickets at all, unless you’ve completed your goals by mid-game and want to try going somewhere else.
Here’s another major problem I’ve been having, that I hope experienced players can help me with – how on earth do you manage to accumulate enough cards for all the routes you need, including backup routes? Time after time, I’m forced to play my trains early because the key tracks are being gobbled up, and suddenly I’m in a situation where I’m forced to detour via a track I didn’t plan for, and I don’t have the colors for it. How does one avoid getting stuck in that situation?
Making early draws from the deck helps – it gets you an assortment of cards and chances to draw a locomotive and another card (or even two locomotives).
Also, look at the map to see which connections you really need and which ones can be worked around with alternatives, and wait until you have a good collection of cards before going for the latter.
I’m exclusively a face-down drawer now, like the top players. (Not that I’m anywhere near their caliber, but I’ve been told that I do draw cards like them.) It’s great when the colors play in your favor, but there’ve been games when I couldn’t get the one color I really needed, not even from the face-up cards, and couldn’t get any locomotives. There have been other games where I got a late start and missed getting the connection I really needed, or had to burn the cards I was reserving for another key connection (such as the purple track to Miami) and suddenly I can’t draw another damn purple to save my life.
I will say this, however. The one thing that really improved my gameplay recently was to simply stop caring about my rank or online score, or even if I win the game or not. Just connect the cities as fast as possible, and don’t worry about what anyone else is doing. Funny how that simple frame of mind had such a dramatic effect – I’ve won three games in a row since then!
