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Ticket To Ride

Ticket To Ride

Reviewed by Laura Davis

Quick Notes

Age: 8 years and up
Time to play: 30 - 60 minutes
Players: 2-5
Price: $33.00 - $50.00 (1910 Expansion $16.00 - $21.00)
Available from:GatePlay.com, Funagain Games, Amazon.com
Published by: Days of Wonder

The Goals

Get the rail road routes you need to connect the cities shown on your destination tickets before your opponent can claim them. Points are awarded for each city to city connection and for each completed destination ticket.

To Play

All players are dealt destination tickets, and four train car cards. Train car cards are color-coded and match specific city connections on the board.

Each turn, you may either draw train car cards, trade in train cards to claim routes, or draw more destination tickets.

When claiming a route, discard the matching cards from your hand and place small rail car markers on the board.

Be careful of getting too many destination tickets! Any city-to-city routes you fail to complete will cost you the same number of points you might have earned.

When a player places rail car markers on the board and is left with two or fewer markers, all players get one more turn. Then the game ends.

Scoring

During the game, points are earned for each city-to-city connection. Once gameplay ends, all players reveal their destination tickets. Completed tickets add to your score. Have the longest continuous route or complete the most destination tickets for bonus points.

Ticket To Ride

Comments

This is the best game to start your collection.

Ticket To Ride is one of the greatest games available. It is easy to learn, fun to play, and has a very wide appeal. Even people who “don’t play games” like it.

The quality of the components and the strategy of gameplay are impressive.

Be careful when shopping or ordering because there are several versions of Ticket to Ride: Ticket To Ride, Ticket to Ride USA 1910 Board Game Expansion, Ticket to Ride Europe, Ticket to Ride Switzerland, Ticket to Ride Märklin. They even have a card game version, Ticket to Ride: The Card Game, which is about half the price of the board games. There is also a Ticket to Ride Scandinavia, but as far as I can tell it is only available in Europe.

The various games play much more differently than just a change of maps. If you're in North America, I recommend that version (Ticket to Ride) so that your kids get an informal geography lesson that is closer to home.

Concerns

My only complaint about Ticket To Ride is that the train car cards and destination tickets are undersized. This makes them difficult to hold and fan in your hand, so it’s hard to keep track of what cards you have. We solved this problem by purchasing the Expansion Deck: Ticket To Ride 1910. This game expansion adds new destination tickets, and replaces all rail car cards with standard sized ones. We play very often, so the expansion deck was a great value to us.

On the Davis Scale

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Laura Davis is a writer based in the Fort Worth, TX area. If you are interested in submitting a game for review, please contact her at happypalms@gmail.com.