The main premise is that you are competing to build the best postal system. You do this by building a network of post offices in the cities represented on the board, acquire carriages, and collect bonus tiles. To help in this endeavor, you enlist the help of 4 postal officials. The game nears the end when a player has acquired a value 7 carriage or has placed all his houses which causes the game to come down to final round. The player with the most victory points wins the game.
The board and cards are very attractive. There are 20 wooden houses, representing post office, for each color (4 colors). 66 city cards are used to build routes. While the artwork and cardstock are nice, the cards themselves are small, making it difficult to shuffle them as well as putting them in card sleeves. The 20 bonus tiles and 20 carriage cards are used to score points as well as the latter being used to indicate time left to final round. 4 summary cards convienantly explain the turn order and the special abilities of the 4 postal officials.
The layout of the board before play is as follows (taken straight from the game instruction):
-Place the game board in the middle of the table. -Place the bonus tiles face up on the game board on the spaces designated for them. In each stack, place the tiles in ascending order, lowest on the bottom and highest on the top. -Shuffle the city cards face-down, place 6 cards face-up on the city card spaces on the board, and place the remaining cards face-down as a supply next to the board. -Sort the carriage cards by numbers and place on the board in the spaces provided. -Each player takes the 20 houses of one color, a summary card, and a principle firm card, placing them before himon the table (his play area). -The players choose a starting player using any method they want.
On a player's turn, he takes the follwing actions in the order shown before passing the game to the next player to his right.
(1) The player must add a city card to his hand. The player either adds 1 of the 6 face-up city cards to his hand or the top-most city card from the card supply. After taking a face-up card, he replaces it with top-most card from the card supply. At this phase, he can either enlist the help of the Postmaster, who allows the player to take an xtra city card from card display or card supply, or the Administrator, who allows the player to xchange all cards on display before he takes a card.
(2) The player must play a city card from his hand to begin a new route or add to an existing route. The player places his city card net to each other in a row. This row represents the current route of the player. A player can have only one route at a time. To add to his route, the player may place a city card on the right or left side of his current route row and must represent a city on the board that is directly adjacent to the city represented by the card it is placed next to. A player can only begin a new route when he has no current route on his play area. At this phase, he can enlist the aid of the Postal Carrier, who allows the player to add a 2nd city card to his route.
(3)The player may close and score his current route if it contains at least 3 city cards. To close and score a route, he places houses, collects any tiles earned, and any new carriage earned. The player then places all city cards from a route he closed on the discard pile and reduces his hand size to 3. He can enlist the aid of the Cartwright at this stage. The Cartwright allows the player to acquire the next highest carriage even if his route is 1 or 2 cities fewer than required. The score is calculated by adding the player's highest carriage to the sum of the points on all his bonus tiles then that number is subtracted by the number of unplaced houses remaining in his play area.
*note: you can only choose to enlist 1 postal official per turn
The beauty of the game is in how one goes about in obtaining the bonus tiles and carriages. There are 3 types of bonus tiles: (1)bonus tiles for longest routes which are 5,6, or 7 cities in length; (2)bonus tiles for provinces. the playergets the bonus tile if a he has houses on all the cities in that province or pair of provinces; (3)bonus tile for the player who is the 1st to obtain a value 7 carriage or by placing his last house. The carriages are obtained by completing a route that is as long as the number on the carriage.
The bonus tiles are placed in such a way that the 1st player to close a route that satisfies the condition will obtain the top-most tile which has the biggest bonus. The next player to complete the same route will take the next top-most tile that has a smaller bonus but is usually higher than the one underneath that.
I initially played a couple of games with a friend. At first, it didn't impress me. It felt dull and played more like a racing game. After having gotten a better handling of the rules, we played again. The second game opened my eyes to the depth of this game. I felt compelled to see how many different ways I could go about obtaining the tiles and carriages to get the best score in the end. Several people crowded our table and soon I had a 4 player game going. The number of players from 2 to 4 drastically changed the dynamics of the game. Whereas, in a 2 player game, I could fairly strategize and think a couple steps ahead, the 4 player game made it almost impossible to do so. The 4 player game got me to constantly change tactics on the fly. The environment changed more frequently and so I found myself frequently having to adapt. I noticed that it wasn't just me wanting to find other avenues of getting the best score when the other players kept wanting to play another game then another after that. Each game, each player tried different strategy in how he obtained the tiles, carriages, and in how he used the postal officials.
In conclusion, don't let the first game set your impression of this game. This game is all about optimization, efficiency, and adaptation. The more we played, the more we were drawn into the game. Each of us were compelled to play one game after another to try different strategies. The game being short made this more so (can be played in about an hour). Some have claimed that T&T is more solitaire; that there is very little interaction among players. While it can feel like solitaire especially in a 2 player game, this is somewhat lessened in a 4 player game due to the fact that one worries what card(s) the other player(s) will take or if he will use the Postal official, the Administrator. In my exprience, there were some tense moments in the 4 payer games I played. Another claim is that T&T is a lighter version of Ticket to Ride. I never played TtR but I've heard that in TtR, your course is pretty much set from the beginning whereas in T&T, your course is not determined at the beginning. While the rules may not be as complicated as in TtR, it is my experience that T&T has a lot of depth. And yet another is that T&T is too random. There are rules built in to soften the randomness of the card draws but IMO, it is this randomness that makes the game more intense (see my notes above about must having to adapt). Most importantly, fun was had by all the players who played this game that day!
