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The caboose (drafted hubbie
Eric) guides late entries to the end of the line. |
A bigger ballroom awaits TTR in 2016.
No more table shortages for the mega events. |
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Steve Boone and Gus Collars enjoy
their ride. The back-to-back 300-entrant field was a first for
WBC events. |
Cliff Ackman and Yoel Weiss amongst
the crowd. Yoel's club, Jay's Basement. has done especially well
in this event over the years. |
And the Train Just Keeps on Rolling!!
 The naysayers said that topping 300 players was just an anomaly caused by being part of the Days of Wonder 2014 TTR World Championships. Attendance would surely erode thereafter. I guess they were right. The erosion has begun … the 2015 dropped … by one. Ticket to Ride again exceeded 300 participants. A record-setting heat of 208 in the first heat topped any of 2014’s heats during the year of the TTR World Championships.
After the long lines of last year, my husband, Eric came up with a superb idea to manage the check-in line. He wore a black hat with a caboose on it, labeled “Ticket to Ride: End of the Line”. It helped folks know where the line was and as the caboose got closer, it helped us manage the set up of games. It felt like the end-game time management you do in Lost Cities.
Eric couldn’t be the “Caboose” every heat so I had some wonderful substitutes who stepped in. Bradford McCandless did a great job doing caboose duty for the second heat. For the third heat, Bonnie Neubauer, volunteered for caboose duty even though she hadn’t played in the tournament this year.
One of the strategies for TTR consists of taking cards for many rounds before laying down trains. In my second heat, my husband was in an unusual game of “card hoarding”.
All through the first deck they mostly drew tickets. Three of the players built a handful of trains and only Eric remained pure. When they used up the deck, there were only about seven trains on the board, and so they shuffled the tiny discard pile. Pretty soon, there was no deck left and no discard pile. Eric still had no trains on the board, so he took tickets! He had a quarter of the deck in his hand and took tickets before he played a single route! With the deck and discard pile both empty, someone played a route using green cards, and they immediately shuffled those cards (!) and made a deck out of them. This allowed the next player to say "I'll take two green off the top of the deck," something you don't usually here unless there's cheating going on.
In the end Eric scored all his tickets once again and earned the Globetrotter bonus for the win.
The Jay’s Basement gaming group had a strong showing in the playoffs with Brett Fox the top seed with three wins. The other triple heat winners were Erin Griffin and Todd Trahan. All three got byes into the semifinals to help keep the quarterfinals to 4-player games.
The Final was a 30-minute intense game with defending champ Alan Elkner trying to keep his title. There was a massive traffic jam in the Northeast as the players fought to get into NY and Boston. (This is nothing new in real life!) Many flushes of the cards put lots of wilds in the discard pile for later in the game. So few tickets were taken that all four players got the Globetrotter bonus for finishing three tickets. Max Duboff pulled out the win with the largest route score and Longest Train.
A special congratulations is in order for Antony Saccenti who won his first plaque in an adult tournament. Best of all it was the much coveted 6th place Sand Plaque! A new qualifier for the first Sandman Parade at Seven Springs!
With so many people in the tournament, I want to thank all my helpers, especially my assistant GMs, Sarah Beach and Nikki Bradford. I also want to thank Perrianne Lurie, who came early for every heat to help us with set-up.
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GM Beach oversees some of his younger
charges. |
The train depot was packed this year. |
 Ticket To Ride Junior
 The Beach family turns out en masse to help in the Juniors
room and it is a good thing since a veritable floof of 46 pint-sized
travellers contested GM Matthew Beach's Juniors tournament on
Saturday afternoon with six new top passengers emerging. Top
honors went to:
~1st: Tegan Powers, age 11
~ 2nd: Angelina Gonzalez, age 12
~ 3rd: Benjamin Waterhouse, age 12
~ 4th: Brandon Wines, age 9
~ 5th: Preston Saccenti, age 6
~ 6th: Alex McNally, age 10
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Claire Brosius [7th Year]
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