Saturday!

Humble Bundle has a downright unbelievable deal right now for computer board games. It’s a “pay what you want” deal and, for a buck, you get the Ticket to Ride Complete Bundle, Sentinels of the Multiverse, and Mysterium. I’ve not played the latter two but Ticket to Ride complete costs more than 30 bucks and that, by itself, is a crazy deal.

If you’re not familiar with Ticket to Ride, the physical game is a fun little train game where you’re responsible for linking cities together by train routes. You get a small amount of points for cities that are fairly close together (Sault Ste. Marie and Nashville, say) and a larger number of points for cities on opposite sides of the map (NYC and LA, say) and you link these cities by linking up routes between cities that are real close to each other… so, like, if you’re going from New York to Atlanta, you can go from New York to Pittsburgh to Saint Louis to Nashville to Atlanta and, tah-dah, your route is set and you get the points for it.

You make the routes by placing your cars on the tracks (which are color-coded) and you get cars for the tracks by getting the right color cars from the deck (Chicago to Omaha requires 4 blue cars, for example). Once you have the required number of correctly colored car cards, you can take the track… that is, if someone else has not taken it first.

Everybody is chasing rivalrous goods on the board and it’s full of the joys of “okay, I can’t get from Santa Fe to Oklahoma City anymore because Wally took that route… maybe I need to go from Santa Fe to Denver to Oklahoma City?” and getting your hopes dashed because someone else goes from Denver to Oklahoma City first because you can’t get that red car you need.

Anyway, the complete bundle of Ticket to Ride not only has the map for the US, it has maps for Switzerland, India, Germany, the UK, and a ton more.

AND IT’S ONLY A BUCK! And, on top of that, you get two more games (that, granted, I’ve not played).

And if you pay $10 for the Humble Bundle, you not only get those games, you get Pathfinder Adventures, Carcassonne, an expansion for Sentinels of the Multiverse, the Talisman bundle, and, on top of all that, Armello.

But even if you only spend the buck, you’re going to get *HOURS* of enjoyment out of the game. Maybe even days.

So… what are you playing?

(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]