All aboard Ticket to Ride – still the greatest gateway board game

If you ask a friend what their favorite board game is and they respond with ‘Monopoly’ the thing to do is not force them to join you for a lengthy game of Root or Twilight Imperium. It’s also not to embark on a five minute rant about the many drawbacks of that property-trading exercise in misery, as hard to resist as that might be. What you should do with a friend so tragically unaware of the joys of modern board gaming, is sit them down for a quick game of Ticket to Ride.

That’s because Ticket to Ride remains, two decades after the first version came out from publisher Days of Wonder, the best beginner board game money can buy. Here you’ll find out why it has a permanent place on our best board games list, exactly what makes it such a good first game, and whether it’s still worth adding to your collection if you’ve moved on to more complex titles.

What is Ticket to Ride?

Ticket to Ride is a game about trains, or more specifically train lines. That might sound pretty dry, but don’t worry, you’re not camping out at stations waiting for a particular engine to pass by, you’re building vast networks to connect major cities for grateful passengers.

This simple strategy board game sees two to five players competing to complete point-scoring routes, joining up various locations on a shared map (of the world, Europe, or the US depending on your copy).

You do this by placing train pieces of your color onto the board, scoring points and hopefully progressing towards finishing one of the secret longer routes you’ve been assigned, depicted on destination ‘tickets’ everyone draws at the start of the game.

But you can’t just lay down rails wherever you like. Instead, each available route connecting two cities has its own color, which corresponds to the suits of train cards you must draft from a shared deck.

On each turn, you’ll have to decide whether to pick up more cards, lay some track, or take new destination tickets. Once a player runs low on train pieces, the game ends and you tot up the scores.

There are a couple more wrinkles, and various versions or Ticket to Ride expansions add a few more, but that’s essentially the game. Told you it was simple!

What is good about Ticket to Ride?

From our description, you might worry that Ticket to Ride lacks interaction, as everyone strives to complete their own individual destination cards, but in fact that’s not the case.

That’s because of the shared board everyone is playing with, which is the source of most of the game’s drama and fun. You see, there are only limited spaces to lay down routes on the board, so you’re always at risk of getting blocked by the competition.

This adds a delicious tension to the decision of what to do on each turn. When you see your friend grabbing all the green train cards, does it mean they’re aiming for the same piece of track as you? When your aunt takes the last route available between Pittsburgh and Chicago, is she about to cut you off on your journey to Denver, or is she heading somewhere less harmful?

When I play Ticket to Ride, I usually have the sensation of desperately stretching, trying to complete crucial stages of my own destination cards before the most valuable spots are snatched up. Often, you’ll find players all sit and gather train cards for a while, only to launch into a cascade of track laying when someone makes a move that threatens one of their routes.

Ticket to Ride does a great job of being exciting, but never unpleasantly stressful. That’s because you’re so limited in the number of moves you can make, that you’re hardly ever gripped by choice paralysis.

This also leads to a fairly quick and fast-moving game. You can easily get through an entire playthrough, including setting up and packing away, in an hour

Both of these factors help make Ticket to Ride a good family board game or first title for beginners. What’s also nice is that, even when behind, you never feel you’re missing out on some crucial strategy or element of gameplay. In engine-building board games, for instance, watching more experienced players have longer, more complex and exciting turns while you’re stuck doing pretty much what you were doing at the beginning can be aggravating, but in TTR you’re never gated by some hidden layer of strategy.

Ticket to Ride can also suit different types of gamers. It can be as competitive or as relaxed as your attitude to it. While for me, it’s a tense race, for someone less competitive it can be a nice chill-out game where you’re focused on plugging away at your own goal.

What is bad about Ticket to Ride?

No game is perfect, however. And if there’s one element of this board game that’s controversial, it’s blocking. Most people play Ticket to Ride by focusing on their own routes, only clashing when their cards happen to converge. But it’s also possible to spend time deliberately disrupting your opponents, which can create feels-bad moments now and then, if two players go into the game with different expectations.

If you’re playing Ticket to Ride with family it’s not often likely to crop up (unless you have a particularly devious grandma or something) but if you have a mix of new and more experienced players, this is something to watch out for.

Ticket to Ride is an easy play and an easy teach, but as you might guess its simplicity is also its greatest weakness. While there are a few key decision points in the game – when to take new destination cards for instance – it doesn’t offer anything that taxing, and if you’ve moved on to more complex games like Arcs or Ark Nova, you might find yourself quickly getting tired of the same old trains.

That said, while successive plays could get dull, as long as Ticket to Ride is not the only board game you play, I don’t think that scenario is very likely.

I’ve had my copy in my collection for years, as whether you’re tired out after a hard day at work or playing with gamers with less hardcore tastes, it’s the perfect game for a casual board game night.

If you really love the straightforward but compelling nature of this game, and find yourself playing it several times a year, you should check out our Ticket to Ride Legacy review, as this could be the perfect next step in your boardgaming journey.

Source: Wargamer