Dave's Copy of Ticket to Ride

Six years ago this past spring, give or take, Dave brought Ticket to Ride into the break room because his usual lunch crowd had thinned out to just him and me, and he needed a second player or the box was staying on the shelf of his cubicle for another week. I’d never played anything heavier than Monopoly at that point, genuinely didn’t know board games had moved on since I was a kid, and I remember being annoyed at first that a lunch break now had rules attached to it.

Lost badly. Dave is one of those people who’s quietly good at spatial puzzles without seeming to try, and he’d clearly played enough to know which routes to grab early. I complained about it the whole rest of the day, the way you complain about something that’s actually gotten under your skin, and by Thursday I’d asked if we could play again.

What I didn’t expect was that it wouldn’t stop being a lunch thing. Dave mentioned he had a group that met Tuesday nights, mostly people from a hobby shop he used to frequent before it closed, and asked if I wanted to come try something heavier. I went in expecting one visit and stayed for what turned into six years and, by my count, something like two hundred and forty Tuesdays, minus holidays and the two years my work schedule flipped to swing shift and I could only make it every other week.

The group’s changed shape since then. A couple of the original hobby-shop people moved away or just stopped coming, the way groups do, and it’s mostly Dave, Priya, Marcus, and me now, plus whoever’s current partner or roommate gets curious enough to sit in for a session. Priya joined about three years in and immediately started spotting balance problems in games the rest of us had been happily ignoring for months, which has been good for the group even when it’s annoying in the moment. Marcus is newer, maybe two years, and he’s the one who actually reads rulebooks cover to cover before we sit down, which none of the rest of us have the patience for.

I still have that same battered copy of Ticket to Ride at Dave’s place, or I assume I do, I haven’t actually checked in a while. Feels a little sentimental to ask. But it’s the reason there’s a converted garage full of shelving at my place now, the reason I know what an insert is, the reason I’m writing any of this down at all. Funny what a slow lunch break turns into if you let it.