Even with 5 players can you have a situation where 4 people decides to keep destination cards within the same area, thus leaving one player uncontested. And the situation will be aggravated by fewer players. However I don't see this as a problem, but rather a feature: the board has been made with a lot of small links on the East coast and all the long links going East-West. I don't think you will win the game unless you build at least some of the long links - and this will automatically spread you across the map. Looking at the map and the available destination tickets there seem to be a pattern: all but two tickets have a value equal to the minimum distance in wagons. The two exceptions are Sault St. Marie-Oklahoma City (9) which can be built with just 8 wagons, and Seattle-New York (22) which can be built with only 20 wagons. Looking at the 30 tickets can they be divided into 3 main groups of value: 12 small ones (4-9), 11 medium (10-13) and 7 large (16-22). Los Angeles is the only city with 5 tickets of which 3 are in the highest group and the other two in the lowest. New York is the only city with 4 tickets: 2 high (H), 1 medium (M), 1 small (S). There are 5 cities with 3 tickets each - all on the Eastern part of the board: Miami (1H,2M), Montreal (one of each), Chicago+Atlanta (1H,2S) and Houston (1M,2S) 13 cities have 2 tickets: Portland + Vancouver (H,M) Seattle + Nashville (H,S) Winnipeg + Phoenix (2M) Duluth, Denver, El Paso, Santa Fe, New Orleans, Calgary (M,S) Sault St. Marie (2S) 10 cities have 1 ticket: San Francisco (H) Dallas, Little Rock, Torronto, Pittburg, Boston (M) Helena, Salt Lake City, Kansas City, Oklahoma City (S) 6 cities have no tickets at all: Las Vegas, Omaha, Saint Louis, Washington, Raleigh, Charleston Not entirely sure how useful the information is, but clearly some cities are more important than others, so one may build into these even without the relevant tickets. Back to Table of Contents -- Game! # 4 To Game! List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by George Phillies. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com