Gloom and railways

Even in the absence of all bar one of the usual group, we did do some light gaming this evening.  Both recent GenCon purchases and both great fun as it turned out.  Games bought on spec because of pretty packaging can be disappointing, but I found Gloom impossible to resist with its Gorey-esque illustrations.  (That's a sample of Gorey below, not anything from the game).

The point and purpose of the game is to ensure that the family you control suffer horribly before dying with the lowest possible self-esteem score.  Your opponents naturally wish to prevent this, and inflict gratuitous happy events on top of the negatives scored for being molested by manatees and the like.  Simple family fun.

Ticket to Ride has been popular for a long time, but somehow we'd always bypassed it.  I'm not sure why - apart from the feeling that if it's that popular it might be a bit feeble mechanically.  This was a  mistake as it was fun, and a more than decent strategic component.  In this case you spend ages trying to collect bits of train line in various colours so you can connect Winnipeg with St Louis before running out of trains to do it with.

Note - neither game uses dice.  Which is always alien.