The Board and Brew.

A board game, a craft beer and an evening of good times: These are the “Board and Brew letters” — staff writer Jonathan Raeder’s semi-regular reports on the hidden gems and newest offerings from College Park’s best game collection/pub.

On my previous trip to the trendy little cafe, my companions and I decided on the game Ticket to Ride — prompted by (1) its reputation as an excellent game, (2) the presence of trains (which are always fantastic) and (3) its inherent reference to a Beatles song. The game appears difficult but is in fact very straightforward. The board is a rendition of the United States, with several important cities featured and many trails of different colored rectangles between them. The cities were chosen to maximize geographical locations, meaning that cities such as Madison, Wisconsin, and Duluth, Minnesota, are featured, even though our state’s diamond-in-the-rough, Baltimore, is not.

The rest of the game is simple. Each path requires a certain number of train cars of a certain color, and each player gets points for completing individual paths and working toward randomly assigned paths given at the beginning of the game. Complete your randomly assigned (and secret) path and you earn points. Fail to complete it, and you lose those points. For example, I had to build a path from Boston to Miami, and from New York to Los Angeles. I managed to finish the cross-continental path from New York to Los Angeles, but my companions/enemies’ hoarding of blue train parts kept me from finishing the last leg of Atlanta to Miami.

The game is fun and simple but isn’t quite the mind-blowing experience we had been led to believe. Perhaps further levels of strategy would involve attempting to block opponents’ needed paths, but our game unfolded with each of us working almost in complete separation to build our own paths. There aren’t any additional “action cards” to change up the already-placed trains, and while there’s a multicolored train part that can be used as any color, there aren’t any more rule-changing cards. 

A truly fantastic game should have us cursing each other and performing certain actions with evil grins and maniacal laughs. Still, Ticket to Ride is good for these exact circumstances; it isn’t terribly long (about an hour excluding learning time) and doesn’t require complex thinking.

On a side note, when I was there, Board and Brew offered another version of Ticket to Ride, featuring Germany instead of the United States. Any of you interested in that country might want to play that version; it likely won’t be too different.

To pair with the game, I ordered a Dead Guy Ale, served upon request in a frozen glass. On first glance, the pairing doesn’t make much sense, but upon closer inspection, what really is the difference between a pirate and a cutthroat railroad tycoon? Both, after all, make their money from robbing people when they attempt to transport goods or themselves.

Rogue’s Dead Guy Ale is the brewery’s version of a German Maibock, a strong, golden drink that’s traditionally reserved for the spring. My order reflected my own hopes for the weather, but definitely not the reality.

Regardless, Dead Guy Ale is the color of honey and has a strong malty flavor, with fruity embellishments and a hoppy aftertaste. It’s of moderate alcohol content (6.5 percent) and all in all is a quite tasty beer. The good people on beer-rating website Beer Advocate give it a score of 89, or “very good,” and I’m inclined to agree.

My verdicts for the night:

  • Ticket to Ride: 3 ½ turtles out of 5.
  • Rogue’s Dead Guy Ale: 4 ½ turtles out of 5

Are you a fan of Board and Brew’s beers and games? Let me know in the comments which combination I should try next.