Ticket to Ride, by Alan R. Moon, is the designer's newest railroad game, a casual connection game with enough hard decisions to make it quite interesting.
Players: 2-5+
Time: 1-2 hours
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)
This game is being simultaneously produced in English, German, French, Dutch, and Korean. Other names for the game include "Zug um Zug" (German) and "Les Aventuriers du Rail" (French).
The Components
Ticket to Ride comes with a box of high-quality components:
- 1 game board
- 240 plastic trains
- 5 wooden scoring markers
- 142 cards
- 1 rulebook
- 1 online access number
Game Board: A six-panel gameboard printed on heavy, linen-textured cardboard. The center of the board depicts a map of the United States with routes running between different cities, each route a different length (1-6 boxes) and a different color. A scoring track runs along the edges of the map, labelled 1-80.
The entire map is done in a very attractive colored-pencil period style. Various sketches really help set the time period as the late 1800s, and I find the overall effect very pretty.
The routes are all easy to make out, though some of the colors vary a bit from the card colors (particularly the orange and the dark gray), which can cause minor problems for first-time players, but will be almost invisible the second time through. The city names are easy to make out from across the board, though some of the cities are slightly displaced on the map from their real locations to accomodate the route lengths.
As a nice touch, there's also a scoring chart listing route values down in the Gulf of Mexico.
The scoring track running along the edges of the board is easy to use because all of the numbers are printed (as opposed to tracks which only print every second, fifth, or even tenth number), but is too short. Inevitably, one or more players will "lap" the scoring track at least once, maybe twice.
Despite minor concerns, the game board is a very attractive and a useful central focus for Ticket to Ride.
Plastic Trains: These are simple plastic train cards molded in the five player colors: red, black, yellow, green, and blue. They're made out of sturdy, hard plastic, with fairly simple sculpting. Each player gets 45 trains; there are also 3 extra per color which you need to remember to pull out when you play. (We forgot our first game, which thus ran a little long.)
Wooden Scoring Markers: These are thick wooden discs painted in the five player colors. They're used for scoring.
Cards: All of the cards are printed on small, linen-textured cards of medium thickness with rounded corners. The production is quite high-quality.
110 of the cards are Train Cards. Each of these show a full-color drawing of a type of train car in one of the 8 track colors (purple, white, blue, yellow, brown, dark gray, red, or green). They're all very pretty and despite those aforementioned first-time issues matching the colors to the track colors on the board, easy to use.
(Many first time players are also a bit confused that there are 5 player colors which have nothing to do with the 8 track colors; the player colors just list who's who, while the track colors are integral to actual gameplay. Within a few turns first-time players seem to get over this issue.)
30 of the cards are Destination Ticket cards. These each show a map of the U.S. with two cities marked and a score for the ticket. These are slightly plain, but utilitarian.
There's also 1 Summary card, which shows card distrubtions and route scoring (I wish there was one of these for each player, though by halfway through my first game I knew all the route scores) and 1 Longest Continuous Path bonus card, which is just a reminder of a victory condition.
Rulebook: A 4-page glossy rulesheet, very well illustrated with graphics and otherwise quite clear.
Online Access Number: This is a number which gives you access to Days of Wonders online games--currently versions of some of their smaller card games.
Box & Tray: Ticket to Ride is packaged in a fairly standard medium square box. The tray inside is very well designed. There's spaces for each component, from the train and cars to the little scoring markers.
Overall Ticket to Ride is beautifully produced with components that are evocative, attractive, and easy to use. It earns a full "5" out of "5" for Style. (I found the other two Days of Wonder big box games a bit more striking, but this still eked in a "5" rating.)
The Game Play
The goal of Ticket to Ride is to build connections between various cities in North America.
The Map: The Ticket to Ride map depicts about 40 cities, mostly in the United States, but a few in southern Canada as well. Each city is connected to 2 to 7 other cities by routes. A route is a set length, between 1 and 6 spaces, and typically is one of eight colors (though approximately a third of the routes are instead gray, which we'll see is a special, free-building color). There's typically only one route between any two cities, but many of the more popular paths instead have two routes, which are often different colors.
Players will claim these routes throughout the game using Train Cards of the appropriate colors.
Setup: Each player chooses a color at the start to mark his routes and takes the 45 trains in that color. He also receives 4 Train Cards and 3 Destination Cards (of which he may discard one if he wishes).
Further, five Train Cards are flipped face up next to the draw pile.
Train Cards. These 110 cards depict a color of train, related to the colors of the routes on the board. There are 8 total: purple, white, blue, yellow, brown, black, red, and green. There are also 18 "wild cards"--locomotives which may be used as any color.
Destination Cards. These 30 cards list two cities each (e.g., "Denver: Pittsburgh") and a score (e.g., "11"). Players have to contiguously connect the two cities with their trains in order to score the points, and are penalized if they don't (hence the opportunity to discard).
Order of Play: Each turn a player takes one of three possible actions:
- Draw Train Cards.
- Claim a Route.
- Draw Destination Cards.
Draw Train Cards. There are always five face-up Train Cards next to a face-down deck of the same. You get to, one at a time, take two cards either from the face-up cards or the draw pile. Whenever you take a face-up card, you replace it from the draw pile. There's one catch: if you take a face-up engine, that counts as two of your draws. Clearly, you generally want to make draws that help you complete sets to claim routes.
Claim a Route. To claim a route, you must lay down as many cards of the appropriate color as are needed to completely lay out the route (which will be between 1 and 6, depending on what's depicted on the board). If the route is light gray, you may instead lay down an appropriate number of matching cards of any one color.
When you claim a route, you place your trains in the route boxes. This will keep anyone else from claiming that exact same route (though, as noted above, sometimes a pair of cities have two potential routes between them). You also score points: 1 for a length 1 route, 2 for 2, 4 for 3, 7 for 4, 10 for 5, and 15 for 6. (The exact numbers are nonintuitive at first, but become obvious by halfway through your first game.) Clearly, longer routes are more valuable.
You can only claim one route each turn, no matter how many Train Cards you have.
Draw Destination Cards. Alternatively, you can draw 3 Destination Cards and return up to 2 of them.
Ending the Game: The game ends when one player finishes a turn with 2 or less trains in his stock. At that point everyone (including the player who's almost out) gets one last turn. Then the game is done and scoring occurs as follows:
- everyone already has points for their routes.
- If a player successfully completed a Destination Card by forming a contiguous route between the two cities, he adds the points from the card to his score, else he subtracts them (ouch).
- Whomever has the longest continuous path of routes gets +10 points.
The player with the highest score wins. Ties go to the player who completed the most Destination Cards.
Two & Three Player Games: If you play with two or three players there's one slight change: for the double routes, where there are two routes between a pair of cities, only one can be used. This help keeps the game very tight.
How the Game Plays
Generally, at the start of the game, you'll keep two of your original three Destination Cards, and these will give you a general indication of initial cities that you want to connect. Then players will start working back and forth between drawing Train Cards (from the face-up selections, if at all possible) and building routes. Some players will methodically begin working toward their original 2, 3, or 4 cities, while others will play a bit more haphazardly, claiming the routes that appear to be in the most danger first.
Competition is a real issue, as other players can purposefully or accidently steal routes you want to take. This can force you to take much longer, more round about paths to complete connections, or else to give up on them entirely. (The Seattle-Portland 1-length connection is perhaps the worst to lose, because if you're forced to go around you must go: Portland to Salt Lake City [6], Salt Lake City to Helena [3], then Helena to Seattle [6]. Fortunately, there are two routes between Seattle and Portland, and if you decide it's critical for your plans you can grab it any time with just one Train Card.) Despite this, you'll probably get to complete most of your connections in a game through careful playing.
Choosing more Destination Cards throughout the game is the key to winning, both to direct you toward more building, and also to give you bonus points at the end. Some players finish up one set of Destinations before drawing more, while others draw a number at the start, to give them more idea about how they want to expand. Each method has its own dangers.
Finally, after an hour or more of play, someone purposefully expends his last few trains to bring everything to a close. Destination Cards are revealed and final scoring is done.
Relationships to Other Games
Ticket to Ride is a connection-based railroad game centering on set collection. The connection half of the game is reminescent of Transamerica, a much less strategic game about connecting together U.S. cities; for that matter, most railroad games have some sort of connection element. Set collection is, of course, the core of Rummy and many other card games. Ticket to Ride melds together these two styles of gameplay fairly effortlessly to good result.
Alan Moon himself has produced a number of train games. This is the most similar in feel to Union Pacific, a majority control game centering on set collection with a minor connection component. Union Pacific is, perhaps, more seriously strategic, but Ticket to Ride is more vivid, evocative, nerve-wracking, and in my mind, just more fun. They're also very different games.
Ticket to Ride is also the third release in Days of Wonder's "Big Box" series. They've thus far done a great job of releasing beautiful games that are superb for family, friends, and other slightly more casual gamers but still have a lot of strategy in them and will thus please serious gamers. The other two releases were Mystery of the Abbey and Pirate's Cove (each of which I thought was quite good, but this is my favorite of the set).
The Game Design
Ticket to Ride is overall a quick, enjoyable game that plays well. Here's some of the best game design:
Tough Decisions: A hallmark of any top-rate game. You always want to take more than one of the possible actions. Do you take a nice face-up card or build a route before someone else does or do you finally take the time-out to pick-up Destination Cards crucial for end game scoring? (The whole question of which Destination Cards to take, or not, and when is also a tough decision.)
Great Brinkmanship: The tension is really upped in the game by a constant feeling of brinkmanship, as you hold off on picking up beneficial routes because you're wanting to do other things with your turn.
Real Strategy in Both Set Collection and Connection Building: Both aspects of the game allow real strategy. In the Set Collection, the five face-up cards give you genuine choices to make, while in the Connection Building you sometimes have to consider building connections that aren't important to you yet (and perhaps never will be) based upon the possibility of other players closing up parts of the board.
Here's some of my minor issues with the game:
Analysis Paralysis: At times the richness of possibilities is sufficient that a player will become paralyzed as to what to do. However, compared to many other games which suffer from A.P., it's pretty minor here.
Some Shallowness: Though there's a lot of strategy, it doesn't feel as deep as some of the more complex strategic games. After two games, I still want to play more, but I'm not entirely sure the same would be true after 20 games.
I was wavering between a "4" and a "5" on Ticket to Ride. I've finally decided on the higher score for two reasons.
First, though it may only be a "4" if you're a serious strategy player, it's undoubtedly a "5" in the slightly lighter family game arena, and that's the market it's aimed for. You just won't find a much better combination of rules simplicity with strategy complexity than this game.
Second, it passed my "playtest test" with flying colors. Not only did everyone enjoy it quite a bit, but 2 of the 3 other players asked when it would be available so that they could buy their own copy (answer: in about a week). You can't get much higher regard than that.
Thus, Ticket to Ride gets a full "5" out of "5" Substance rating.
Conclusion
I've already played some darned fine games this year, but Ticket to Ride is amongst the top. It's easy to play, it's evocative, it strategic, and it's colorful. Ticket to Ride has my highest recommendation for just about any audience, but it's particularly great for family, friends, and more casual gamers.
Review Summary