by murksofus
Hey Tim, thanks for the answer.Yes, we played with the Europe map. It seemed, given the geography of the region, that you could always find a similar-in-length path almost no matter what 2 countries you chose.
In the last two rounds players chose wildly different starting countries, and after a few minutes of finding optimal routes, everyone scored basically the same. I think the geography is partly the reason for this, making Europe not much fun to play in my opinion.
Playing the US is not really an option in my group as a few guys refused to play it, citing that they had no idea where any states were. They had no interest in just blind guessing everything (although considering the scores of the first game, I'm not sure that would be a bad strategy).
I felt, given the large amounts of cash players are given over the game ($600), that the final scores would be more varied than around $30 from last place to first place, especially given that one person random guessed everything, and the person who won knew absolutely nothing about geography. If two players like that win/and or place well in a geography game, the game is just too much luck in my opinion to be enjoyable for someone who enjoys the subject as much as I do.
This may be fixed playing with the US map, but I doubt it'll change enough to change my mind.