Dinner with the Pink Flamingos

Our Cornerstone Sports Night team, the Pink Flamingos, had our team dinner at Rob and Kathleen's place at the beginning of the month. It was a potluck dinner. Since I can't cook I brought a caramel cake and four bottles of pop.

I was the first to arrive. Early. I came straight after my boarding home visit. Rob and Kathleen were still getting their food ready. Rob made ribs and Kathleen was working on a variety of appetizers like Jalapeno peppers stuffed with cheese.

Not everyone could make it. Ricky was out of town. I believe some people were sick like Freda and possibly Andrew. Either that or he was busy. Winnie made it out though. So did Philip, Derek, Josh and Kim.

Dinner was good. There was a lot of food. We had to take the leftovers home.

After dinner Philip brought out his board game, Ticket to Ride. I believe it's an award-winning game developed in Germany. The idea is to gain points by either building sections of train routes and completing longer routes between various cities on the game board from the route cards you pick up.

I believe up to five people can play at once. The game board gets pretty crowded at that point. You can build train routes by picking up coloured cards (up to two) on your turn. Route sections on the board are colour coded. To build a section you have to collect the number of coloured cards between the two cities. It's pretty simple. The problem is if someone else builds on the section you want. Then you could be in trouble.

Anyway, we played two games. I won both. At first everyone was employing the same strategy - trying to building the long sections of track connecting to distant cities.à

In the second game I tried something different. I didn't concentrate on connecting the long sections of track between two distant cities. Instead I noticed that a lot of points were awarded for building long sections of track (15 points for building a six section track as opposed for 1, 2 and 4 points for building one, two and three section tracks).

So I concentrated on building random six section tracks around the game board. Though I didn't get many points for connecting distant cities, I built up such an immense lead that no one else could catch me. And I finished all my trains before people could connect their distant cities. So they actually lost points for the distant cities they didn't connect.

I have to admit that strategy probably strayed from the main idea of the game, but it was a sure way of winning. Oh well.

Anyway, it was nice for us to get together to get to know one another a bit better over the holiday season. Our team is pretty strong overall. I think we'll do well this season.