A few new games:
Ticket to Ride Marklin -- Alan Moon has described Ticket to Ride as a game of chicken. 'Everyone wants to keep drawing cards to get to long routes, but wait too long and you get cut off.' I certainly see that with Marklin. Whenever you place a route, you can place a passenger. And you have a fourth turn type ... move a passenger along the board, picking up scoring chits. You also have a card that lets your passenger take one leg on an opponents train. So now you want to build a nice long route with lots of stops (since the tokens are based on stations), but if you wait too long other passengers can swoop in and take the better tokens. Tickets are split into long and short routes, several destinations are foreign countries, that have several stations (but serve as endpoints) that are equivalent from a ticket standpoint. And a very interesting board, with half the map being small grey routes. It's still Ticket to Ride, but didn't add the randomness of Europe. It may not be to everyone's tastes, but my gut feeling says that those who like TTR but thought it was a bit light may like this. I may buy it.
Yesterdays long game was Indonesia, which I loved at the three hour mark and merely liked when it ended at five hours. Our game had a two turn pause that most games won't, so I suspect that it was an oddity. One player has now played roughly a dozen times, and said all the games felt different. An amazing accomplishment, if true. (As with Caylus, all the luck is in setup).
Roma adds another filler to my growing arsenal. After my initial few plays, I think I've played ~8 more times. So it's already on the 10+ list. We do play with house rules, but I'll almost certainly be getting this.
Thurm und Taxis appears very popular. I got to play yesterday and I can respect that opinion. One player compared it to showmanager (with respect to drafting cards), but you pick up locations and have to build a long chain of routes, with lots of different scoring constraints. That's a good description, but here's what I'm thinking -- in showmanager (et al) you don't have much forward planning. But here you have quite a bit of planning ... what routes you want, how you are going to get scoring chits (which you can earn for filling areas with houses, putting at least one house in each area, making long deliveries (which take time but don't necessarily give more houses), and optimally handling the timing of routes. A planning game, but you have the showmanager card drawing mechanic. I think there's a dissonance there, but it was enjoyable enough. I think this will eventually trigger my Tikal reaction and I'll stop playing after my 3rd or 4th game. [Tikal Reaction -- a game that I think has strategy but that doesn't hold my interest when it's not my turn.]
More later ...