1877: A Circus Comes to Town!


It's 1877 and somewhere in America- P.T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Hippodrome is rolling down the tracks. Could it be on its way to your town?


On our fifth play-through of "Ticket to ride Legacy Legends of the West", Cathy and I really started to get into the flow of the game. We were earning coins by laying down company routes. We were earning cards by rolling into big cities. We were staking claim to the west by staking stickers onto frontier territories. We were stringing together circus trains, and piggybacking, and paying our dues to the company towns. We were utilizing employees and pulling out postcards and taking advantage of events as they cycled through the deck. We were drawing new tickets like nothing in the world could ever-ever stop us and we were in the flow.

And in the end she beat me. At first it was just by two dollars until she pulled out some kind of Port Master employee card and she realized she had beaten me by about ten dollars. And I was flabbergasted. How could I have played such a perfect game and still fallen short?


The answer of course is that "It's not over until its over" which is to say, it was never about the game, its about the campaign. The stickers that I so greedily added to my circus passport won't even be scored until the final match (campaign end). The postcards we collected won't pay off until much further down the line. This is an game of investment and the last chips won't be counted until 1898 [until March (until Round 12)].

But this round, this time, it was Cathy holding the crown and this time she had to make the very important decision: where do we lay track next?


Next Time: The Badlands

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