Tickets, Please: A Preview of Ticket To Ride
SUMMARY:
Ages: 8+
Players: 2-5
Est. Length: 30-60 Minutes
Game Design: Alan R. Moon
Illustrations: Cyrille Daujean, Julien Delval
Publisher: Days of Wonder
Genre: Family
Mechanics: Route Building, Card Drafting, Set Collection
Reviewer: Lex Judge
INTRODUCTION
Created by the prolific board game designer Alan R. Moon in 2004, Ticket to Ride is one of the most successful modern hobby games, with over 8 million units sold. It comes only second to Catan in terms of most recommended games for new board gamers.
Classified as a Euro game, Ticket To Ride is known for being accessible (something you can play with older children/aging parents), having low confrontation and no player elimination (unlike games like Monopoly and Risk), and hidden end-game scoring (so grandma can't gloat about winning until after it’s over).
If you, like many people, have traumatic memories of long, brutal nights of playing classic games with your “loved ones” that ended in pools of tears and flipped tables, you can rest easy knowing that Ticket To Ride, like most Euro games, is designed to avoid that kind of experience. That isn’t to say that Ticket To Ride isn’t a competitive game, it certainly is. Your actions are dictated more by trying to better your own position, rather than intentionally hurting your fellow players. Keep telling yourself this as grandma steals the last train route that you desperately needed.
In Ticket to Ride, players are competing to lay their railway routes on a map, connecting different cities and expanding their personal routes across the country. They do this by collecting sets of cards that have types of colored Train Cars on them. For example, the route from Portland to Salt Lake City has 6 blue spaces connecting the two cities, so a player needs 6 blue cards in order to lay their railway route, indicated by little plastic train cars in their player color, between those two cities.
At the beginning of the game you are given secret Destination Ticket Cards that tell you which cities you are trying to connect using your railway route. The farther apart those two cities are, the more points you’ll score. Other players won’t be going for the same cities necessarily, but you never know if their route is going to cut your route off if you aren’t fast enough to get there first.
On your turn, you can either pick a new Train Car Card to add to your hand, draw a new Destination Ticket card, or claim a route by discarding the necessary set of cards and scoring points based on how big the set is. When one player has claimed enough routes that they only have 0, 1, or 2 plastic trains left, each player gets one final turn. Whoever has the most points wins the game!
THE MOMENT THE GAME “CLICKED”
Unlike watching television or reading a book, board games inherently have a learning curve. Every time you want to play a new game, you first have to learn how to play it. Games vary in difficulty and complexity, but every game has a moment where it just “clicks”. Once this moment happens, you’re able to fully grasp how the game is played, and what the goal is. This moment happens at different times for different people, but having an idea of when it can happen is a good indicator of whether or not you’ll enjoy learning and playing a game.
It’s been 3 or 4 years since I first played Ticket To Ride, but I do remember the game clicking fairly early on. Like previously stated, the game was intentionally designed to be accessible, so there aren’t a large number of rules to learn. In fact the rulebook is a well organized 2 pages, back and front. With only one action available out of three possible actions, the game never feels overwhelming or gives you analysis paralysis.
SHOULD YOU PLAY IT?
In my review of Azul, I stated without reserve that everybody needed to play it at least once. While I find Ticket To Ride an immensely enjoyable game, I’m not sure I’d recommend it with the same enthusiasm as I do Azul. You don’t need to be a lover of trains or geography to enjoy this game, but it certainly helps. The large, sprawling map and the charming plastic trains you lay on it gives a sense of the vastness of the United States and the web of routes connecting its many cities. The artwork on the train cards is vibrant, and the discreet use of symbols in addition to the colors makes the game accessible to people with color blindness.
My only minor grievance with the game comes from the amount of randomness that comes with the deck of both Train Cards and Destination Tickets. If you don’t draw well out of both of these decks, you don’t have much of a chance at winning or really even building much. There are just not enough ways to mitigate your bad luck when you’re someone like me who is verified as the Unluckiest Gamer On The Planet (I didn’t inherit my grandmother’s luck I suppose).
While I personally feel the game is a tiny bit over praised, there can be no doubt that it is an excellent Starting Line game for anyone who even has the slightest interest in it. If you do have that interest, the base game of Ticket To Ride can be demo’d at Hitherto any time during open hours!
If you play the demo and end up liking it enough to purchase, the good news is that there are a wide variety of maps to choose from. I haven’t played any of these expansions and variants so I can’t speak to them, but they all come heavily recommend by people who enjoy the game. What’s your favorite version of Ticket To Ride? Let us know in the comments!
Before you make a purchase, be sure to check whether the version you’re buying needs the base game in order to play, or if it’s stand alone.
Just some of the different Ticket To Ride versions currently available for purchase at Hitherto!
Happy Gaming!
