Ticket to Ride - Initial Impressions

Ticket to Ride is the latest game from designer Alan R. Moon, and it arrived at my house last Friday. Since then, it's been played quite a bit as Beth and I hosted a weekend of gaming at a local bed and breakfast. It's an excellent game which gives players the opportunity to both develop their own plans and disrupt the plans of others.

The board -- which lives up to the gorgeous artwork standards now expected from publisher Days of Wonder -- is a map of the United States and southern Canada, with cities connected by rail lines of 1 to 6 in length.

At the start of the game, each player is given three goal cards; each goal card lists two cities that the player will try to connect (e.g. Los Angeles to Pittsburgh or El Paso to Winnipeg). Players must keep at least two of the three goal cards, but may keep all three. At the end of the game, you get positive points if you've connected your cities and negative points if you haven't.

The game comes with 225 plastic train cars in five colors, and each player chooses one color. They are then dealt four train cards, which come in the colors of the tracks on the board.

On your turn, you may either (1) draw two more train cards -- choosing from three faceup cards, or a facedown card off the draw pile -- or (2) play a set of cards that matches a line on the board, and build your trains on that line. Players earn points for building lines, with the larger lines being worth more than smaller lines. (A one-length line is worth one point; a six-length line is worth 15.)

Instead of taking a normal turn, you may choose to draw three new goal cards instead, keeping at least one of them. This gives you another set of cities to connect and is something of a risk, although if you connect the cities it may be the difference between winning and losing.

This continues until one player has less than three train cars remaining. At that point, each player gets one more turn and then the final scores are calculated.

Ticket to Ride gives players a variety of strategic and tactical choices. You could concentrate entirely on your own tracks, working dilligently to connect the cities on your goal card. And if you're able to do that, you could very well win the game.

But messing with your opponents' lines is also a viable strategy. For example, if you build the line that connects St. Louis to Nashville, even if it's not important to your goals, no one else can build there. So if someone is coming from the northwest and looking to get to Nashville, you've forced them to build significantly more track than they would otherwise need to in order to meet their goal.

Ticket to Ride is an excellent game, playing in less than an hour and providing a lot of depth without being complicated. I predict that it will be nominated for the Spiel des Jahres, Germany's Family Game of the Year award, and will also do well in Games Magazine's year-end awards.

I've played twice so far, and rate Ticket to Ride a 9.5 out of 10 at this point. And it could very well go up when I play another time or two.