Ticket to Ride
Ticket to Ride is a board game involving trains. It was first released in 2004, published by Days of Wonder. The game is designed by Alan R. Moon, and illustrated by Julien Delval and Cyrille Daujean.
The object is to spend train cards to claim routes between major cities and to fulfill Destination Tickets. The longer the route, the more points you earn. You can gain extra points for having the longest continuous trip at the end of the game. The secondary, much more fun goal is to fuck your opponents up by blocking their routes to cities you expect they need to get to. If they have a Destination Ticket that cannot be completed, the points count against them.
The routes are color coded, and you must play one train card for each segment of the route. So a route that is 4 orange rectangles in length would take 4 orange train cards to complete. The locomotive wild cards can be used in place of other colored cards. So in the previous example, you could complete the route that is 4 length orange route with 3 orange train cards and one locomotive train card.
The game ends when a player drops below 3 cars in his build pool, or all the spaces are taken up, or when someone gets really pissed and flips the board, sending tiny plastic train cars across the room.
Spin-off games
The game is localized in many regions, and many are proliferated between areas. You can buy Ticket To Ride Europe in the US, for instance, or a special version with a map of Germany, and many other countries. Hilariously, the German title of the game is Zug um Zug.
Since its release Ticket to Ride has spawned a number of spin-off games. Most of which will focus on a particular area and/or period in time. In addition, many of the spin-offs will add new mechanics not found in the base game. The spin-off games currently available are as follows:
- Ticket to Ride: Europe. Includes ferry and tunnel routes in addition to normal train routes.
- Ticket to Ride: Marklin. Includes a passenger mechanic. The game board is based on Germany.
- Ticket to Ride: Nordic. Includes ferry and tunnel routes just like in Ticket to Ride: Europe.
- Ticket to Ride: Germany. The same map as Ticket to Ride: Marklin but set around the turn of the 20th century.
- Ticket to Ride: 10th Anniversary. Remake of base game with a larger map. Also includes the USA 1910 expansion.
- Ticket to Ride: Rails and Sails. Includes harbors and ship routes, the latter of which are claimed with ship cards (as opposed to train cards)
- Ticket to Ride: First Journey. Baby’s first Ticket to Ride.
- Ticket to Ride: New York. Plays on a scaled down map of Manhattan, designed for shorter games.
- Ticket to Ride: London. World’s first underground passenger railway, and the Tube is iconic to the city of London. So naturally, this edition of Ticket to Ride is based on bus routes. No. Really. I’m not kidding. ‘’Busses’’.
- Ticket to Ride: The Card Game. All the fun of Ticket to Ride but without any plastic trains!
There are also various video game adaptions available:
- Ticket to Ride: Online. Web based on Days of Wonder’s website, gotta pay a subscription though.
- Ticket to Ride: The Computer Game. Grab it on Steam when it’s cheap, most of the spin-offs are available as DLC.
- Ticket to Ride: iPad. I’ll leave you to work it out.
- Ticket to Ride: Pocket. For iPhone and iPod Touch. Why two versions for Apple devices? Because money, that’s why.