Ticket to Ride

 Family Fun at the Table

This week I played the board game Ticket to Ride. Ticket to Ride allows the player to role play as a railroad baron, competing with other players to build trains to specified destinations and also to build the longest continuous railroad.

The game mechanics involve strategy and luck. Luck is introduced by the draw of cards. Play begins with each player getting 4 train cards with railroad cars of different colors and 3 destination cards with two cities to connect with the cars. Destination cards have different levels of difficulty and different point values. The player can keep all 3 destination cards or discard up to two of them. The point value of any destination cards you have left is taken off of your score at the end, so the player has to decide if they want to risk not being able to complete the destination route. 

Across the map of the United States and southern Canada, major cities have multiple routes going in and out of them. The routes have rectangles that complete a section of railroad. Some rectangles are gray and the player can use any color of cards to place their railroad car tokens and claim that section, as long as they have the number of rectangles all in matching colors. Other rectangles are different colors, matching the colors of the train cards. The player must have the correct number of cards in the matching color to be able to claim those routes. I know it sounds kind of complicated, but it really isn't. Everyone in my family grasped the game mechanics within two turns. 

Each route has a point value that is assigned based on the number of cars required to complete it. There's a handy counter around the outside of the board that helps you keep track of your score and everyone else's. The first time we played, we had a hard time remembering to move our tokens along the counter, but we didn't make any mistakes the second time!

Strategy comes into play when deciding whether to quickly start laying out short routes or to hold onto your railroad cards until you can lay out a longer route. You can also try to guess what destinations your opponents are trying to get and block them. Clues like which colors they seem to be collecting and  which routes they seem eager to claim can give you an advantage if you pay attention.

The first game we played was with three players. My husband kept saying it was too complicated, but by his third turn he was placing cars and claiming destinations like a pro. My train-enthusiast daughter loved the game. With the three of us playing, the game took around 45 minutes to play. When my daughter and I played, the game took about 30 minutes to play. When we added my son in for a four-person game, game play increased to about 2 and a half hours. We were all kind of ready for the game to end. It reminded me of marathon Monopoly games my extended family would get drawn into at the holidays. 

We came up with one house rule. The official rules are that you wait until the end of the game to reveal your destination cards and count those points. We decided to reveal our destination cards as we completed them in order to move the counter tokens to be an accurate representation of the score. We really liked the counter track as a way to keep the score.

We have a new family favorite game. 

I've been puzzling over the seeming complexity of the game when you are reading the instructions versus when you are actually playing the game. I'm not sure what I would change about the directions, but as I plan a game, I want to make sure the instructions are thorough without scaring people off. Even after watching a YouTube video about how to play the game, we threw up our hands and said, with hope, "It'll make sense once we start playing." Another confusing aspect of the game was that the player token colors have no relationship to the train routes at all. The first time people played the game, that was a stumbling block, but it was overcome fairly quickly,

My daughter the train enthusiast had much to say about the inaccuracy of the illustrations. The illustrations mixed cars and engines from the US, Great Britain and Europe in a jumble that offended her stringent artistic sensibilities. It was really the only complaint she had and she really enjoyed the game. My husband complained that it was "too hard" any time he didn't feel like he was making progress fast enough, but as I said, it didn't take him long to understand the game mechanics. My son's strategy was to get cars out on the board quickly and it helped him win the one game he played with us.

I'm glad I found the game on Mercari and didn't have to pay the $59.99 list price. I had been eyeing it every time we went to Game Stop, but couldn't bring myself to pay that much for a board game. There is a young person's edition that costs less. I'm curious about what changes they've made to the game to make it kid-friendly. 

Overall, I really enjoyed the game. The combination of "luck of the draw" and strategy is a winner.