Ticket to Ride: Europe

Ah, Ticket to Ride. One of the first modern board games I played, and one that remains in my collection. I remember playing it in a crowded McDonald’s totally invested in the game from start to finish. As the game reached its end, another inexperienced friend and I stood up and started frantically checking the board and the cards we had, trying to figure out what to do.

Yeah, in retrospect that was pretty embarrassing.

Can you blame me, though? Simple rules, meaningful decisions, and tense gameplay means even beginners can get stuck in quickly.

Players score points by building train routes between cities and by fulfilling tickets – cards that reward you for successfully connecting two cities with your network. This is done through simple set collection, and a slight push-your-luck mechanism. On your turn, you do one action:

1. Take two train cards from the row (or randomly from the top of the deck)

2. Place trains down on the board by paying a certain number of train cards of a specific colour

3. Take more tickets

This simplicity games the game a lovely flow – take cards, pay cards to build tracks, repeat. Good play relies on balancing these actions. There are a finite number of routes on the board, and once one player builds on a certain route, nobody else can build there. Do you push your luck taking more tickets so you can play multiple routes one after the other, or do you take routes before someone else does? This tug of war is simple, but effective. Balancing is key to remaining....on track (sorry for this and the many puns after it!).

There are two additional rules I really like. Firstly, taking tickets are another risk. While they can reward you with points for completing them, they actually give you negative  points if you fail. This enhances the tension ever further, such as when you see a player gobbling up the same colour of train cards as you – are you both going for the same thing? Will their actions...derail you? 

Even so, this race for routes is not too cutthroat, as you can always look for alternative paths to your destination – particularly in Ticket to Ride: Europe (America is more cutthroat).

The other rule I enjoy is that you lose points for any cards left in your hand at the end of the game. This makes you think twice about randomly taking cards, particularly towards the end of the game. It discourages you from hoarding cards. These two rules add some clever wrinkles to a deceptively simple game, and I love the twist they provide. 

Beyond this, Ticket to Ride has loads – and I mean loads – of expansions. These are new maps for you to play on. They preserve the bare bones of the game, but add more unique rules that change play styles slightly so that they remain fresh. This means that you can explore the game at your own pace, sticking to just the base game until you’ve... trained enough  to try spicing things up.

Ticket to Ride is a modern classic. It was one of the first games to go beyond the confines of the board gaming hobby and into mainstream culture, and its many expansions are a testament to its success. It is an evergreen game that is definitely worth looking into, and one I always... choo-choose to recommend to friends looking for their first game.