Players: 2-5+
Time: 1-2 hours
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)
The technical name of this expansion is "Les Aventuriers du Rail a Lyon", but I've decided to go with a close American translation for this American audience. In this review I've talked more about how my wife & I created the expansion from the Internet files than anything else, but I figure if you're interested in the expansion you'll want to know what you're getting in to.
The Components
The Lyon Extension can be downloaded for free at this site, and then must be constructed by hand. (I should comment that though the site is in French, the components are totally international, once you print them out, though the connection point names are, of course, French.)
I'm thus going to talk about the components in two parts: how I made the game; and how the components work in play. The first is really intended to be informational, while the second is what I'm using for my assessment of the Style of this expansion.
Making the Game
The Lyon Extension is composed of two parts: a new map; and a new set of ticket cards. My wife and I did this project together, with me providing logistics & glue, and her doing most of the detail work. We decided to go with a pretty high-quality production of the game because we wanted to make sure it would last.
The Map: The map can be downloaded as either a set of 12 A4 sheets or a set of 6 A3 sheets. A4 sheets are a little narrower and a little taller than American 8.5x11" paper, but fortunately the designer of Lyon gave wide margins. The result is that you can print out the A4 sheets on 8.5"x11" paper with no futzing required.
We printed the map up at our local Kinko's, which has computers which are connected to the Internet and which can print to good-quality color printers. The printing took just 15 minutes and cost $20 (including the cards, which I'll get to in a bit), which was the largest single cost of the project.
Afterward we used a good paper cutter to crop all the sides of each map sheet, leaving margins only on the outsides of the map. (Since we had to overlap the paper to form the final map, we after the fact realized that we could have just cropped the right and bottom side of each map, and this would have made it easier to tile everything.)
Because my Ticket to Ride game has already racked up over 30 plays, we knew we wanted something sturdy to mount the map on. At our local framing store, we found a 30"x40" X-Acto brand foam board for $5. Foam board has about a quarter inch of styro-foam type material in the middle with poster board on each side. I'd already measured the tiled game map and discovered that it was about 24" on a side. The folks at the framing store were kind enough to cut the board down to 25" on a side for us, just enough space to give us a little margin of error. (Though, as it turned out, not quite enough margin of error; the bottom of our map extends off the bottom of the board by a tiny fraction of an inch.)
The next step was to paste-up the 12 map segments on the foam board. We choose to use "Yes" stik-fast glue ($13 for a big container) for this, something my wife had previously used for collages.
First we laid each map segment down on the board, figured out how it should align, and marked that in pencil. Then, we covered the back of the map segment with a thin layer of the gooshy Yes glue, making sure to run the glue out to all the edges. Then we placed the map segment on the board, aligned it, checked it for errors, and smoothed it down. It was good to have two people to do this work. My hands inevitably ended up covered with glue, but then my wife could lay down the segment with less concern about getting glue on the front.
This step of the game creation was a minor nightmare. It led to tears and arguments. At first we didn't realize that our smoothing process was a bit too firm, and was moving the papers after we'd laid them down. Even after that we had problems getting individual segments aligned: because the glue was starting to harden; or because the segment just didn't seem to fit, possibly because we had it aligned at a slightly incorrect angle, possibly because we'd stretched the paper. Worse, a problem in alignment on one sheet could cascade into a worse problem on the next sheet, until half of the map was off. (We had to tear up one segment, then reprint it, as a result of this.)
After the fact, I'm not sure of the best way to get something laid out like this. If we'd only cut two of the four sides of each segment, as I mentioned above, that might have helped. In addition, the idea of marking a segment in pencil before we glued it was a refinement we came up with partway through our process which seemed to help. As it was, our map ended up good enough, though not 100% aligned, and it was very tiring to get it to that point.
After glueing was done we left the board to dry overnight.
Finally, we needed to coat the board in some way to protect it from the ravages of wear, the sun, and water spills. (By the time we got to this step, we'd actually played a half-dozen times, but very carefully.) For this we used a gel medium called "Golden Regular Gel (Gloss)" which my wife had previously used for collages. It goes on white, then dries clear and is supposed to be water-resistant, chemical-resistant, and UV-resistant.
We spread on the gel medium with two paint brushes. (No cost for the gel, because we already had it on hand and used a fairly small amount.) The only problem at this step was that the gel medium was just a little too liquid, and thus caused the board to wrinkle in a few places.
We did two coats, with a few hours to dry in between. Since those brushstrokes are visible, in the future I'd suggest doing the first coat with all horizontal strokes and the second with all vertical to create a nice cross-hatching pattern (kind of like linen texturing). After drying, the board looked quite nice; I was surprised by how much the gloss coat pulled up the colors in the underlying map.
Afterward the only issue was getting the board flat, because it had pulled up a bit between the glueing and glossing steps. The complete OED came in handy here.
(At which point the final question was where to store a two-foot by two-foot board. Thus far the answer has been, "leaning against the wall atop a bookcase." The wife has suggested hanging it like a painting in the future. It could be like a big sign which says, "We're big gaming nerds", which I suppose we are.)
The Cards: The cards were only available as a set of four A4 sheets. Again, the designers had provided enough margin that printing to 8.5"x11" paper worked without trouble. We printed them onto a pretty thin cardstock, the best that we could feed through the color printer. Using cardstock later proved to be a good choice, even though we decided to laminate, because the cards would have been too transparent if we'd printed them on plain paper.
The cards had crop marks displaying how to cut them out, but if there was a good way to use them, I never figured it out. They were well indented on the paper, and disappeared after you'd cut the cards into strips. We once more used a good paper cutter for this process, cutting the card sets into strips via the crop marks, as close as we could come, then eyeballing them to cut out the individual cards. We then did triage on individual cards which had been cut too large.
Afterward, we laminated the cards ($10, another service at Kinko's). This involved putting them into 8.5"x11" plastic pouches, nine cards to a pouch, then running them through a heat machine. The idea was that the plastic around the cards would melt together into a much stronger plastic, sealing the cards in during the process. The trick that we learned was to feed the pouches through the machine more than once, to make sure that they melted together as much as possible. (Thanks to the Kinko's guys for this and much other good advice and helpful service.)
Afterward we had to cut out the cards from the laminate with scissors (since we hadn't been able to line up our gutters between the cards precisely enough to use the paper cutter at this stage), then take them back to the paper cutter, where we made more precise trims on each margin, cutting the laminate a fraction of an inch outside of the card itself. It turned out to be fortunate that we'd spent so much time getting the cards to be accurate sizes before we laminated them, because any sizing mistakes would have multiplied at this stage (since we'd figured out an easy way to measure from the edge of each card, thanks to the specific layout of the paper cutter). As it was, the cards turned out to be not precisely uniform in size, but very close. I can notice differences if I examine them closely, but not in the least during play.
We were both very pleased with how good the cards came out. The only downside is that they're too thick to really shuffle. But, they're easy enough to swirl around like tiles.
If you're keeping track the whole project cost $48 ($20 printing + $5 foamboard + $13 glue + $10 laminate). I probably could have dramatically reduced that price if I'd had a color laser printer at home (or a laminator, as unlikely as that sounds; or if the Yes glue we had on hand when we started the project wasn't dried up), but in any case it really makes you appreciate the value of mass-produced games. Nontheless, based on plays of Ticket to Ride I'm sure this value will quickly pay out.
About the Components
So, with all that said, a few comments on the utility & beauty of the components (as opposed to their quality, which was solely in our hands).
The Map: The board is produced much like the original Ticket to Ride board, with colored spaces marking routes where trains should be laid. The utility was right up there with the original board with two minor exceptions: there's no listing of the values for various routes lengths (1-6) as there is on the original board, which some players have missed; and the spaces for the trains are just slightly too small, which means they're a little jammed on the longer connections.
On the other hand, I think the board is entirely more beautiful than the original Ticket to Ride board because the designer found a sepia-toned period map of the city of Lyon, which he's used as a background. It looks great and gives a really evocative overview of the whole town.
The Cards: The Lyon extension uses a different, more simplified layout for the destination cards, as opposed to the original game. They're not as attractive, but they're still highly utilitarian. I especially like the fact that on the mini-map on each destination card you can vaguely make out differences in darkness on the routes, which correspond to the different colors on the main board. This helped me a lot in figuring out what was where when I was still learning the connection points on the map.
Overall, the Lyon extension has a few minor missteps in usability (on the board) and beauty (on the cards) but they are indeed minor, and more than made up for by how good the board looks with that period map in the background. I've thus awarded Lyon the same Style rating I gave to the original game: "5" out of "5".
The Game Play
The Lyon extension has no rules changes from the original Ticket to Ride game, which means that any changes in the game play come solely from differences in how the map is laid out. And, there are indeed some differences.
First, the general topography of the board is different. The U.S. map in Ticket to Ride is a general East-West or North-South map with all major routes running along one of those axes. The Lyon extension, meanwhile, is a more circular map. There are major connection points all along the perimeter of the map, and through its interior as well. Thus, play is a lot more fluid, with decisions centering around what arcs of the circle you're going to concentrate upon.
As part of this circular map, the center of Lyon is densely packed, with smaller sized routes and more double routes, while the outskirts of Lyon have more single routes and longer routes (and, as a result, it's also easier to get cut off from these connection points). The Rhone River, running through the center of Lyon, provides a minor obstacle, but there are enough routes across that it's rarely a game-stopping one. Overall considering all these topographical constraints, as well as a hilly, hard to get area in the top left of the map, there's a lot of interesting geography in the map that seems to work well.
The destination cards go hand-in-hand with this topographical layout. The smaller value cards tend to be centered around the center of the map, while the larger value cards almost always involve visiting at least one outskirt connection point, sometimes two.
The only other thing of particular note in this game is how the gray routes have been choosen. There seem to be a lot more important gray routes, typically toward the center of the map, than there were in the original game. This tends to give players more ability to freely strategize while playing and choosing what cards to select, which overall seems a good thing.
The Game Design
I've played about a half-dozen games of Lyon since we put together the map, most of them two player, but one five-player. Here's a few additional thoughts on how well the game design works:
Player Numbers & Crowding: In general, the game seems to work well for both two and five players, the two extremes for Ticket to Ride.
At two players the game often feels generally loose (a bit moreso than the normal game), with little concern about the other player getting in your way (much). This is primarily due to the fact that the center of Lyon is so well-populated with routes (though see my notes about getting cut off, below).
At five players the game feels pretty tight, particularly in the center of the city with everyone competing for routes along and across the Rhone. This was great, though tense.
In both situations, it feels like there are more connection points (or at least more connection points with multiple destination cards) that it's possible to get totaly cut off from. The bottom left of the map is particularly tight, with St. Foye, St. Irenee, and Point du Jour all being connection points that can become inaccessible near the end of the game. Personally, if this were my supplement, I think I'd look a bit at the bottom left corner of the board, and have included more routes or fewer tickets there. However, the issue isn't unbalancing, just a bit frustrating at times.
Destination Tickets & Scoring: The destination tickets are set up very carefully in this extension. The result is interesting, and well-considered, though it changes the importance of the bigger tickets. Overall, the shortest tickets seems to be weighted toward the city center, while the longer tickets seem to be weighted toward the outskirts.
As a result, the shorter tickets are slightly less valuable to do (because they involve more really short connections, and thus take more time), while the longer tickets are slightly more valuable to do (because they're more likely to overlap, and thus give you more "freebies"). This emphasizes the slight problem I have with the original game, with the longer routes being just a little too valuable. On the other hand, it means that players really have to work for the highest valued connections, probably a good design element.
On the whole, the Lyon extension plays very differently from the original United States map, and that's a very good thing. In addition, the Lyon map contains some interesting design elements, such as the glut of routes in the middle of the city and the hard-to-get hilly region at the top left, which are both neat. Some of the design decisions don't seem quite as polished as the original map board, but I still find Lyon entirely playable, replayable, and fun. Thus I've given it the same Substance rating I gave the original Ticket to Ride: "5" out of "5".
Conclusion
Constructing a supplement like this from the 'net takes a lot of work, especially if you want it to look nice and survive well. In this case, it's well worthwhile, as the Lyon extension is well-designed and a lot of fun to play. If your Ticket to Ride game has picked up twenty or more plays, I'd highly suggest getting your favorite gaming partner(s) together and constructing this supplement as a fun art project; your reward will be a number of new & enjoyable plays.
