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This is our favorite Ticket to Ride for 2 players! The map is small enough to still be competitive with only 2 players, which isn’t true for most Ticket to Ride editions.

In fact, Nordic Countries is our second favorite Ticket to Ride overall, it’s just behind UK & Pennsylvania in our ranking. UK & Pennsylvania we like just a little bit better because you can buy shares in companies which significantly depends the game’s strategy in our opinion.

I absolutely love Terraforming Mars. It’s one of those games that gets board games to be more popular.

That being said, I think expansions make the game much better still, especially the Prelude expansion. I wrote a detailed article on why Prelude is the best Terraforming Mars expansion, but to summarize shortly:

In Prelude you get interesting and powerful abilities right at the start of the game. So it’s like getting a beginner’s boost. This is super helpful and it makes the game much better, because it shortens the game. Specifically, it takes out the least epic part of the game (the beginning in which you can’t do a lot yet).

So yeah, that’s my 2 cents on Terraforming Mars and the Prelude expansion!

Explorers and Pirates does many great things, but as strategy gamers we’re mostly concerned with how it impacts Catan strategically. And we can say that it affects it very positively! The extra modules really open up new ways to play and to win, which makes this expansion very refreshing.

So we really like the Explorers and Pirates expansion, but it’s not quite our favorite. In our ranking of the Catan expansions we rank it second, just below Cities and Knights. This is because we think Cities and Knights also opens up new win conditions, but does so a bit more elegantly, without having to introduce completely new modules. So it stays truer to the original Catan.