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Review of Ticket to Ride Map Collection 4: Nederland
Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 60-90 minutes
Summary of the Components
Ticket to Ride Nederland comes with one game board; a deck of destination tickets; cardboard bridge toll tokens; and a rulebook.
Quality: Days of Wonders' components are always great quality, and this is no exception. The large gameboard is solid cardboard as are the bridge toll tokens. The cards are all good weight cardstock. 5 out of 5.
Beauty: Days of Wonders' components are always beautiful too. As usual, there's attractive artwork and great graphic design all around. I particularly like the use of tulips — which appear both on the score track and the destination tickets. On the destination ticket, the color of the tulip even shows its general value! 5 out of 5.
Usability: The core Ticket to Ride system does a great job of supporting usability with: its destination tickets that clearly show what you're trying to connect; its clean (yet attractive) game boards; and its colored routes that also include icons.
With that said, I had a few issues with the usability of this expansion. Most notably, the city names on the game board were in a hard-to-read cursive font that literally everyone had troubles with; I generally had to use the destination ticket maps to be sure I knew which city was which. Second, the destination tickets are starting to approach information overload because of the inclusion of additional city names on them — meant for use only in the 2-player game.
Generally, I found the usability great except the cursive city names, which were genuinely troublesome. 4 out of 5.
Theming: The theming of Ticket to Ride games is always somewhat light, but there was good effort here with the bridges and tulips giving a feel of the Netherlands 4- out of 5.
Overall, Ticket to Ride Nederland has great beauty and quality and strong usability. I've given it a "5" out of "5" for Style, primarily because it's so darned pretty.
Summary of the Gameplay
Ticket to Ride Nederland is played out on a map of the Netherlands where players will have to pay bridge tolls as they build tracks.
About the Map: The Nederland map is very unusual because it's almost entirely composed of double routes — and those doubles are available for any number of players (not just 4 ). This takes some of he tension away from the map, since there's less chance of being utterly cut out from a locale. WIth that said, there are still some very tight locations on the map, particularly the area around Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Utrecht.
About Bridge Tolls: Each route now has a bridge toll requirement — an additional cost that players must pay to build, using bridge toll tokens that they receive at the start of the game.
There's one big catch with bridge toll tokens: if you're building the second route of a double route, you make your payment to the player who played the first route of that double!
Bridge toll tokens aren't precisely coordinated with route length: there's some variation in the exact cost. This can create another strategic decision when choosing where to build.
(It also has caused Days of Wonder to vary the values of the destination tickets in this game, to account for both route length and bridge toll token cost — so expect that their values won't match up with the route values in other Ticket to Ride games.
Going into Debt. If you can't pay a bridge toll, you have to take a debt chit, which is worth a few negative points at the end of the game.
Ending the Game: At the end of the game there's no longest-route or most-tickets bonus card. Instead players who do not have debt chits get bonus points based on how many bridge toll tokens they have in their store.
Relationships to Other Games
Nederland is (course) a supplement to the original Ticket to Ride game. This is the fourth Map Collection, following Asia, India Switzerland, and The Heart of Africa.
The Game Design
When I first saw the bridge toll tokens in Ticket to Ride, my immediate concern was running out. It turns out that's not too big a deal: several of our players got low, but no one bottomed out. However, it's probably more of an issue the fewer players you had.
Nonetheless, the bridge toll tokens were still a very important part of the game. That's because there was constant brinksmanship to grab double routes just before an opponent did … because that ensures getting the money you paid for the toll back. There's always a lot of tension in Ticket to Ride, as you compete with other players to grab the juiciest routes, but it felt amplified in Nederland, due to the simple act of passing those tokens around.
Multiple times throughout the game, players grabbed routes that lay outside of their current network, solely in the hope of collecting toll from other players. In other words, the bridge-toll-token mechanic was quite successful — though ultimately it's still a somewhat small addiiton.
As a result, I've given Nederland a "4" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
Ticket to Ride Map Collection 4: Nederland offers an interesting new map for Ticket to Ride and also a great new mechanism, the bridge toll. As is so often the case with new Ticket to Ride mechanics, bridge tolls manage to increase the tension in the game, which is always to Ticket to Ride's benefit.
This probably isn't an expansion for beginners, but it's a nice variation on the TIcket to Ride theme; players who have played out the base game will enjoy it.
