With Thursday upon us, it's time for the Epic Games store's free game distribution season. This week's double feature is Asmodee Digital's board game adaptations Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride, which will be available for free for one week.

Carcassonne is a "classic tile-placement game" in which players place different types of terrain tiles and squires called "meeples" to create a medieval French landscape and build up a region. Tiles are drawn at random, so the landscape is constantly changing as players try to place tiles in a sensible way and gain the greatest advantage. Although a bit unusual for a video game, the board game is highly regarded. Boardgamers Anonymous describes the game as "a game that everyone should play. ...... called it "a modern classic that can be kept fresh with a wealth of expansions and variants.

"Ticket to Ride" is also based on a board game and can be broken down a bit more simply: you become the owner of an old-fashioned railroad and must draw and play cards to claim routes and destinations before anyone else. Both games have been around for a while - "Carcassonne" was released on Xbox 360 in 2007 and "Ticket to Ride" on XBLA a year later - but board game adaptations tend to hold up well over the years, and at this price Nothing will beat it.

Plans to include a third game, Pandemic, in this week's giveaway were scrapped earlier this week, and the game was in fact removed from the Epic Games Store entirely. There is speculation that it may be related to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.

Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride will be free to play until February 13 at 11 a.m. ET. The following week, Epic will be getting a little more modern and releasing two more high-profile games: the junky but excellent medieval RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance (which is expected to be a much smoother experience than it was a year ago), and the Because the game is M-rated (Epic adds a more family-friendly option whenever a free game of the week is M-rated) is "Aztez," a strange but cool blend of turn-based strategy and wild, violent beat-em-ups.