F&*# Ticket to Ride

When Ticket to Ride came out in 2004, it represented an evolution of the train games (a genre that's been pretty successful over the last 30 years. But instead of evolving toward the complex, it evolved toward simplicity. Ticket to Ride is a designer board game that I can successfully play with my 8 year old. The same cannot be said of Steam, and or even Empire Builder/Eurorails.

And Ticket to Ride is a fairly solid game. You earn VPs in three ways. First, every time you connect two cities you get some points. The longer the connection (between one and six lengths) the more poitns you get, and non-linearly. A connection of only two links gets you two points, but a connection of length six gets you 15 points. Second, you score points at the end of the game linking two cities on your start of game tickets. The cities can be quite close, or on opposite sides of the board, and the value of the points is based on distance (linearly). Finally, there is a bonus of 10 points for whomever has the longest contiguous rail at game end.

Ticket to Ride has just a few mechanics, and each is very well implemented. The game has good pacing and gets tense/exciting the whole way through. Early the question is who is going to start laying down track first, and late game the concern is can you get all your tickets connected, should you draw more tickets, can you block an opponent who is trying to connect cities late.

The weakness of this game, for me, is that connecting cities that are six lengths apart is worth considerably more than the tickets that at first blush appear to be your priority. There are eight of these connections, and if you just tried for all of those, at 15 points each, well...you would run out of trains. But if you didn't run out of trains, you would score 120 points, which is easily a winning score. So the best strategy is to draw good tickets that allow you to pursue an east/west strategy that incorporates many of the six link connections.

I don't want to over emphasize strategy in this game. Tactics are important too. Things like when you start to lay down track, where you draw your cards from, when you use your wilds, all this is important too. When to draw additional tickets can be a critical decision, and for a game of elite players, this and the actual tickets drawn is often the difference between winning and losing. Note, I am not an elite player, but I know some elite players :) All that said, good tactics can beat good strategy, but not usually.

Tips:

*Unless you're desperate for one of the cards showing, in the first half of the game you should draw from the top of the deck.

*Pay attention to the cards other people are drawing, not every card, just take note when they take two blues. That means blues are going to be difficult to get until your opponent plays them down.

*Watch your remaining trains. Don't commit to something you don't have enough trains to complete :) Try to finish off strong, playing the remaining trains on as long a track as you can. Don't limp to the finish trying to draw three of a kind to you end the game.

*Watch your opponents hand size. It lets you know if you have to worry about them stealing some track your interested in.

*Watch your opponents number of remaining trains, you need to know how close you are to game end.

*Blocking is underrated. You should have sets of cards you don't have a plan for. If your opponent is telegraphing his destination, then laying them down in his way could be devastating to his game.

6/10 - For me the lack of complexity boils the game down to drawing tickets compatible with the longest rails. Then the best tactical player with those tickets wins!