For the first half of class I was placed in a group to learn the card game Rook. It's very similar to Hearts which can be played with a normal deck of cards; Rook has it's own special deck. It's played with two teams of two with partners sitting at opposite corners of the table. Before you begin playing everyone is dealt their hand and there is a round of bidding. If you have lots of high cards that will let you win hands you want to bid high to let your partner know that. Or you can bid high to try and throw off the other players. The key is to keep the final bid low so the penalty isn't as great if you lose or make the bid high if your far behind in order to make a last ditch effort to catch up. The bid can be as high as 180, which is the maximum number of points attainable in a round. The winner of the bird gets the kitty, which consists of five randomly dealt cards in the middle of the table. It's a big advantage to get this because you have to put five cards back in the pot so it's a chance to either get rid of low cards or try and get rid of an entire suit from your hand so you can play trump cards more often. The person who wins the bid also gets to decide which suit acts as a trump. The rest of the game is very similar to Hearts with the only differences being that 1 is higher than 14, there is a Rook card that is worth 20 points and acts as the lowest trump card, and only 5's, 10's, and 14's are worth points. This game pretty much uses the same strategy of Hearts where you try to hold on to higher cards to win better pots with the addition of a team element where you want to put point cards in the pot if you partner is winning because even if it's lost from your hand it's still going toward your team score.
For the second half of class I taught some people how to play Ticket to Ride: Europe. It's a very basic hand management game where you collect cards with different colored train cars on them to build sections of railroad of matching color and quantity. The goal is to accumulate the most points through building segments (longer segments are worth more points) and completing tickets by connecting two cities listed on the ticket with your trains. The Europe edition has a few extra rules. Some segments require a certain number of locomotives (wild cards). To build segments designated as tunnels the dealer flips from the draw pile the same number of cards as the player is trying to build with; for each additional locomotive or card of the same color as the player's cards the player must supply an additional card. If they don't have enough cards then they fail to build the tunnel and must try again on their next turn. Finally there are also stations, which players can place on a city in order to borrow another player's segment of train to complete a ticket. However, each train that is unused as the end of the game is worth 4 points.
The best strategy is build as many tickets as you can and try to get tickets that you can overlap so you don't have to build as many segments. You can try to sabotage other players by predicting where they will build and blocking them but this is a risky strategy in that you may end up wasting trains and have unfinished tickets at end game that result in a score penalty. I saw with my group that towards the end of the game the two players in the lead employed different strategies. One decided to just keep building long segments in order to rack up points from building and to win longest route at the end of the game, which is worth 10 points. The other player had an extensive network of trains so he just kept taking more tickets in order to try and get points for routes that he had either already completed or that he could finish in one to two turns. It was a very close game, so both strategies are viable.
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