//------------------------------//
// Ocellus' board game night 
// Story: Live While we're Young 
// by The Blue EM2 
//------------------------------//

Ocellus had everything set up ready for the occasion. Fold out table? Check. Markers, extra playing pieces? Check? 6 chairs for her friends? Check. Plenty of drinks and snacks? Check. Seriously, the school was extraordinarily generous with its start of term care packages!

As she made her final checks that everything was in order (including reshuffling the draw stacks one more time to be absolutely sure), she suddenly heard a knock at the door. She finished shuffling the cards, trotted over to the door, and opened it.

Sure enough, the gang were on the other side. "Evening, Ocellus," Smoulder sighed, as she walked through the door.

"Hi!" Silverstream said, as she whizzed through the door. "Ooh! A map of a funny continent! Where's this Kiy- yiv?"

Gallus took his seat. "This again?" he asked.

Yona and Sandbar were the last to arrive. "Yona hope she not get confused." She looked at the map. "Oh. Yona not get to build railway to Yakyakistan?"

"At least it's not Southern Rail," Sandbar sighed, as he looked at the board. "Ticket to Ride: Europe?"

"Yep!" Ocellus replied, hopping up and down for a moment before taking her seat. "There's only space for five players, so I'll be the gamesmaster for this particular game and oversee distribution of cars and suchlike. You already have your destination tickets. You need to keep at least two, so look at them and hand me back the ones you don't want."

After a few minutes, Gallus and Smoulder handed two of theirs back to Ocellus, who stuck them in the box lid. They then looked to their train cards. "Remember," Ocellus told them, "those cards are used to purchase the sections of track that link cities together. You need all of the same colour."

"What do the grey routes do again?" asked Silverstream.

"You can claim those with any colour, but they all have to be the same colour. Four orange, for instance."

"If only you ran my family's boardgame sessions," Sandbar sighed. "Dad's efforts to explain the rules are always needlessly complicated. Though that may be a side effect of playing Settlers of Equestria, which is absurdly complicated anyway."

"We never had board games underwater," Silverstream said. "It was because the boards would get wet and soggy, and the pieces would simply float away."

"Well, we won't have that problem here," Smoulder sighed. "Who goes first?"

"Play proceeds anticlockwise from the player next to the last one who won."

There was anothe moment's silence as they all tried to remember who had won the previous time. Then Yona jumped up for joy. "Yay! Yona get to go first!"

Unfortunately, she crashed into the table, sending all the playing pieces flying.

"YONA!"

"Oops," Yona said, looking sheepish. "Sorry."





Once they had got the mess cleaned up, and the board reset, they set about playing the game. It was absolutely glorious.

"What do the black borders mean again?" Smoulder asked.

"If a section of track has a black border," Ocellus explained, "it means that it's a tunnel. In order to build one of those, you might need to pay extra cards in order to build it. When you play, three extra cards are turned over from the draw pile. If any of them match the colour you've played, you need to pay more cards. If you can't pay, you can't build that section of line but you do keep the cards and can try again later."

"Huh. Might as well give it a shot. Four yellow."

Four yellow cards were placed down, and Ocellus turned over three cards from the draw pile. "One yellow!"

Smoulder sighed. "Good thing I had one in reserve," she said, and handed five cards to the discard pile.

Seconds later, Yona groaned. "Yona was going to build that!" she said, indicating that Gallus had just built the 8 track section from Stockholm to Petrograd.

"That's 21 points in the bag for me," Gallus smiled, "catapaulting me into the lead!"

"Highest score on the board doesn't necessarily mean you'll win, Gallus," Sandbar replied, as he played some card. "Four orange, Paris to Marseilles."

"Oh, going French are we?" Smoulder sparred. "Then again, Garble likes wearing berets and reciting strange poetry, so I guess I can't complain."

"Does he?" Silverstream asked. "Ooh! Two yellows please!"

"Yep. He's a beatnik, and keeps an old typewriter with a scroll in it to ensure his train of thought isn't broken."

"Interesting."





The game continued on for a while, with the players building lines and adding to their point scores. Yona even drew more tickets, which was rather surprising to some, but not others who knew that drawing extra tickets was an easy way of getting lots of points.

Then came the final play. Gallus was down to two pieces first, and this gave the others one last turn.

"Great," Sandbar sighed. "I was so close to finishing."

They each played their final plays, and then began to add up the scores.

Ocellus had a pen and piece of paper to write on, and started scribbling down the scores as they were read to her.

"50 on the board, 25 in tickets, I still have three stations."

"80 on the board, but only 12 in tickets. One station."

"Oof! What happened there?" Smoulder asked.

"I didn't complete my last tickets which cost me points."

The other gave their scors, which were many and varied. Ocellus finished adding the results, and set about reading them out. "In order of success, Yona, Silverstream, Gallus, Smoulder, and Sandbar."

"Ah well," Sandbar replied, as he hopped out of his chair. "There's always next time. Thanks for the game, Ocellus."

"No problem!" she said, with a smile, as she began packing up. "I'll clear up here, so you guys can get off to bed."

The others all said their goodbyes and set off for their respective dorm rooms. Ocellus could have sworn she saw Silverstream and Gallus share an affectionate moment, but she decided not to comment. After all, she was openly in a relationship with Sandbar, so it'd be hypocritical of her to comment on it.