Get on Board!

The biggest board game success story since that top-hat-wearing fool tried to Monopolise the London property market has to be Alan R Moon’s Ticket to Ride. The original game pulled into the station in 2004 with its simple gameplay and colourful components taking the world by storm. After only ten years of its release, it had sold over three million copies and has continued to break the bank in the decade since. For those of you who have yet to jump on board, the rules are simple. There is a central map, (in the original game it was the USA(but I will come back to that) and all across it were a series of coloured tracks that connect all the major cities. At the beginning of the game, each player receives a set amount of little plastic trains in their chosen colour and three tickets showing pairs of cities. Your job is to complete those tickets by connecting them using your trains. Do so and you get points. If you do not, then you lose those points. Sounds easy right? So how do you put those cute little carriages down? You need to collect train cards of the same colour matching whatever track you want to lay down. If you want that little connection between LA and San Fran then you will need either three pink cards or a mix of pink and wild cards. Once you do, you can trade them and place your trains, collecting points for each time you place. The longer the track the more points that placement is worth. On your turn you have three options. You can either pick two cards from the card market, (blind from the deck or from the face up options) adding to your unlimited hand. Or you can discard cards to place trains and score some points. Finally, if all is going well and you have completed some of your tickets you can draw some more. This is the real spice of the game. Get greedy and you won’t finish all of your tickets and lose out big time at the end of the game. But get lucky and you can draw tickets you have accidentally completed already! The end game is triggered when any player has only four trains or less remaining and all points are tallied. As well as scoring as you go along, you add or deduct your ticket points as well as reward the player with the longest continuous track.

Choo Choo Choose Me

Much like Monopoly it didn’t take long for Days of Wonder to utilise the power of local appeal. But unlike the big ‘M’, Ticket to Ride realised that in order to treat your audience with the respect they deserve, slapping a skin onto the product wasn’t going to cut it. And so they started releasing new maps that offered different mechanisms into the game. The first map set was Asia which added a six player to the game and also allowed for cooperative team play. Or you could play the Heart of Africa map and get extra points if you managed to collect terrain cards that matched your routes. This allowed for localised marketing but also variation for those who just wanted new elements to try. Most recently they started releasing city versions of the game including New York and London that are designed for a shorter game. And even a junior version as a brilliant introduction got young players. For many of the expansions you will need one of the larger base sets to play, either USA, Germany, the Nordic Countries or in comes Ticket to Ride Europe.

Euro-Vision

Europe didn’t just replicate the USA version with a different map. It offered some new mechanisms and cards to change it up. First up are the channel crossings. As Europe is broken up by water ways you might need to use ferries to continue your routes, whether across from France into the United Kingdom or from Essen to Cophenhagen. To do this you are now going to need to have a certain number of locomotive (wild) cards. This makes the search for the wildcards much more competitive. You could quite easily play the base game without ever taking a wild but here, you are going to need them to travel across the map. So this tension when they appear in the market row is much more exciting! The next addition is that of tunnels. Building tunnels is dangerous work and so laying down these tracks comes with risk. When you decide you are going to play a tunnel track you must declare what colour you are using but don’t have to say where. Then three cards are drawn from the face down draw pile and for any card drawn that matches your declared colour (yes that includes wilds) you must discard an extra card. This can be brutal if you are particularly unlucky. It adds a great decision point, do I go now and risk it before anyone else has a chance, or do I play it safe. The final new mechanism, and perhaps the nicest, is the stations. Each player gets three station pieces in their colour. These can be placed at any city (without a station) and will allow you to use someone else’s route from that particular spot. For every station you still have at the end of the game, you will score three points and so you aren’t going to want to play them willy-nilly. But, when you are holding that big point ticket and someone takes the only track you can use to complete it, then these little plastic towers are a lifesaver! This is the only module you can choose not to play with if you want a tighter, more cruel game, but having it there means you can be more adventurous with your ticket choices.

Despite the appeal for the Euro-centric player, the extra mechanisms make it the go-to base set. If you are to own only one of the big boxes then this is the one. A great map without lots of variety and that station module makes for a much ‘nicer’ game, especially when playing with younger players. And if you really want to localise then I recommend buying Europe along with the United Kingdom map which offers a complexity for more experienced players or something for the family to work up to together. Come one, what are you waiting for? Get on board and play Ticket to Ride!

This blog was written by Dan Street-Phillips

Editors note: This post was originally published on 21st April 2023. Updated on 4th April 2024 to improve the information available.