Ticket to Ride : A Ride Worth Taking
Let’s look at what makes Ticket To Ride a modern classic.
Box Art
Published by : Days of Wonder Created by : Alan R. Moon
My first big train ride I ever undertook happened a few years ago. It was a trip from Miami to New York City, through the Eastern shoreline route, with the expectation of snowy blankets covering the terrain as it was the thick of winter, the end of January upon us. My expectations were high, exuberant, but with the prospect of a 33-hour ride, I was a bit worried that it could all derail when boredom set in—or worse yet, that the seat next to me would be occupied by someone with a nightmarish attitude, body odor, no self awareness of personal space or a combination of all three. Yahtzee!
Did I make a mistake? Maybe I was romanticizing this travel experience a bit too much? Why choose a method of transportation that would ten-fold my travel time compared to a flight? In short, I was curious. Plain ol’ curiosity. This is, after all, the method of transportation that buttressed the expansion of the United States. Tracks crisscrossing across the continent, from sea to shiny sea. The prospect of small adventure. Riding a cart, watching miles of terrain swoop by, seeing the change of green vegetation give way to patches of snow to thick layers of it as we go north; chasms opening up below you, the track suspended up in the air; trifle little towns dotting a country side then reaching city limits as concrete envelops your surroundings—taking it all in as the gentle sway of the train rumbles under you as it hugs curves, or passes over slightly uneven track, it’s own type of turbulence.
Even with some (major) hiccups, my train ride was an experience, something that I will remember for the rest of my life—and one that I will probably never do again. It was 33 hours of travel. 33 hours. One way. Never again.
But you know what I’ll gladly do over and over? Play Ticket To Ride.
Laying some track down
Miami
I won’t mince words about Ticket to Ride, or obfuscate how I feel about it in long winded prose. It’s a great game. Many a word has been thought, spoken and written about Alan R. Moon’s breakout game, and I would probably be etching the same well worn platitudes others have stated before me. If you read this far and have been pondering about getting a titan of the industry, buy it.
Still on the fence about it?
Well, let me go and give context to what I like about it. There are a few reasons why I will always have Ticket To Ride (or one of its iterations) in my game library. It’s akin to storing your favorite salvo of food, tucked away in your pantry or fridge; the odd Oreo cookie, a good slice of gouda, the delight of a dulce de leche cheesecake. You know, the one thing you can pull out at any time and be cocooned in comfort, never letting you down in its existence.
Ticket To Ride is such comfort food. You may not have it every day, or on a weekly basis, but it’s there when you need it. I particularly like to take it out when it provides an entry point for the uninitiated. A gateway as people would say. I’ve played with folks of all ages, and to my surprise, I’ve seen people who disavowed board games flip their own script and be enthralled in the concept of laying little plastic train pieces across an abstracted map America. I would say, I enjoy watching people discover Ticket To Ride as much as I enjoy the race to complete my cache of destination tickets. It’s a treat seeing others disarm themselves of the old fashioned concept that board games aren’t—or can’t—be for them. This lets them see it otherwise.
Safe Travels (?)
Colored Tracks
Part of the reason why Ticket To Ride is a prime candidate for the best gateway game is its focused simplicity. The rules are easy to explain; collect cards of the same color to match sectioned tracks of that color on the map (when demanded of) which allows you the right to place down your small colored trains, connecting cities to try and complete your destination ticket to score points. Got it? And off you go. Sure there are a few extra bits of nuance (more on that later), but if you want a quick, painless explanation, that’s pretty much all you have to say. There might be some trepidation as to how such a sparse, uncomplicated description such as that could muster any interesting gameplay. Well, the trick here is the constraints of the map.
Ticket To Ride, and all it’s variants, lives and derails on its map design. Here, the map is a mishmash of small and long track sections, some with a single track, others six sections long. You score points depending on how big of a section you complete; one section a single point, but a three-sectioned track will get you four, and a six-sectioned a whole 15 points. There are also small parts where two tracks sit side-by-side allowing two players to claim a track between two cities. At first everything looks clean, straightforward, in truth, pedestrian—the telltale sign of false sense of security.
Then, at the midway point, the first game a new player experiences always unfolds into the horrible realization that, aghast, you might be cut-off from your grand design of reaching New York from Los Angeles. There is a terrible entity hidden within Ticket To Ride: encroachment. You see, the crux of Ticket To Ride comes when someone decides to build exactly where you set your eyes on to build next. That, once the pleasantries and initiation of learning its basic rules, Ticket To Ride becomes ruthless. An arena of attrition. Over time each colored train placed down negates someone else’s desire to connect their own tracks, their links shattered before they can realize their potential. I’m in Montreal and I need to get to Atlanta, but Benny, Jerry and Sue are muddling my prospects with their own trains, chocking the possibility of my tracks connecting to their destinations.
Over time the expanse of the map suddenly changes from an open track on the plains of Nebraska to a packed shoulder-to-shoulder rush hour commute on the Tokyo Metro. We nudge and nudge, push and garrote our fellow travelers out of the way hoping to eke out our own paths before theirs. Mr. Alan R. Moon, what have you made of us?
And you know what? I’m all for it! You see, Ticket To Ride might be described in technical terms as a set collection and path building game, but step back and you’ll see, technicalities aside, this is actually a race. A madcap, puzzler of a race.
Speed trap
Trains
Let’s talk about that nuance from before. Part of the reason Ticket To Ride works more as a race than a straight up area control game is because of its constant annexation of available tracks by other players. Routes get taken. Lanes become unavailable. That important link between two cities is closed off as someone chucks down their trains onto it. If you don’t act quickly you might be left out of the race all together. Hence why you realize early that expediency is as much a strategy as route making. Making the best of what you have in your hand to carve out your piece of the map before others is imperative. You’re constantly fixating on your opponent’s moves as well. Why are they setting down tracks so close to yours? Will they cut me off at Kansas City? If only those blue cards would show up so I can set it down before anyone else!
But here in lies the other part of the equation. This game’s mechanisms also insist on your patience. Sure, you want to get a move on quickly. You want to start setting down your trains onto those sections between St. Louis and Duluth—but you can’t. At least not as speedily as you’d want. You see, you’re as fast as the cards you draft say you are. A big chunk of the game is dictated on card drafting from the market row. On your turn you have two options; draft a card from the five face-up cards available on the market, or blindly draw from the top of the draw deck. You get to do this twice, except if you pick up one of the wild cards if they happen to be available. Pick that up, and your second draw is nixed. If you’re in luck and you decide to draw blindly and happen to chance a wild card, you get to draw again since other players wont know what you picked up. Hooray. Whatever your tactic on your turn, the truth is that you might get bupkis when drafting. You might need some red train cards to set down on a specific colored track, but nothing is available that fits the bill.
Since you need cards of certain colors to set down trains to corresponding tracks, you also need a way to offload cards of colors you don’t need onto the colorless train tracks in a way that helps you achieve your goal. Thus, having multiple avenues to set down your trains becomes important to completing your goal; the see-saw of managing your hand on one end of the map to the other. You have to build up a patchwork network of tracks daisy chaining a hodgepodge of sections that throw elegance out of the way. However, it’s not such a bad thing, and maybe the most necessary of skills.
The beauty here is that it’s a cerebral management of paths as well. Efficiency doesn’t have to be validated. If your destination ticket needs to connect Toronto to Seattle, you may as well use existing paths in your network taking that passenger from Toronto to Miami, to Houston to San Francisco to Seattle; the worst transcontinental train ever created. Yet it needs to be figured out on the fly at times once routes become congested and outright taken before you can set yours down.
This race to be first is both demanding and exhilarating when you have what you need to claim a track. Ticket To Ride ramps up its most interesting moments at the right time when any card draw or placed track can signal the end of the game. It’s brilliant.
You’ve reached your destination
Cards
Ticket To Ride is a classic. It has sold millions of copies. They keep pumping out variants to the formula—both more intricate or with different map variations you use with the base game components. You can even play it with Alexa. In other words, it’s here to stay.
What I like the most about it is its ease of play. I may not play every week, but if suggested it, I won’t say no. It’s slips right onto the table whenever the mood is right for it. To show people what games have to offer, it will be right there along with Carcassonne and Arboretum as my go to picks for gateway games, and I wager if you’re looking to get started on this journey of modern board games, I couldn’t suggest a better place to hop on than Ticket To Ride.
