a route, which scores points, with more points
for longer tracks. At the end of the game you
score for completed destination cards and lose
points for uncompleted ones.
At this point I need to admit something:
before I started researching this piece I’d
never played Ticket to Ride. Not once. I’d
played Ticket to Ride: Europe, and others,
but I’d never played the original game. And
you know what? Removed of all the extras,
the ferries and tunnels and passengers
and goods and shares and technologies,
stripped back to the bare essence of the
game, it’s really tight. Everything comes
down to simple, pure decisions: build now
or build later, start that route now and risk
being guessed and blocked, which routes
to prioritise, which colours to collect.
Everything’s a choice, and none of the
choices are obvious or uninteresting.
It’s not perfect. A player who gets route
tickets that are close or overlapping has
a huge advantage over someone whose
destinations are all over the map, east-coast
routes are point-poor and take several turns
to complete, and there aren’t many places
where players can interact directly. You can
take a train card that you suspect another
player wants, but there’s no reason
to do that unless you need that
card too. You can lay a route
to block another player, but
again there’s no reason to
unless you need the same
route. ere’s almost no
direct player interaction, no
reason to barter or bicker or
trash-task. Playing over the net
is not an appreciably di erent
experience to around the table.I
n Germany Ticket to Ride is called Zug
um Zug, which may be the best name
for a game ever. It’s a phrase that doesn’t
translate easily: ‘zug’ is German for ‘train’,
but ‘zug um zug’ means ‘step by step’, and
if you say it over and over it has the rhythm
of a steam locomotive gathering speed. It’s
the perfect name for a game of building and
connecting vaguely Victorian railway routes,
and strikes exactly the right tone for Alan R.
Moon’s 2004 masterpiece.
To be honest, this article is mostly
unnecessary. If you’re enough of a gamer to
be reading this magazine, you have an opinion
on Ticket to Ride. It’s ubiquitous. It’s eclipsed
Settlers of Catan as the go-to gateway game
for the hobby, has shifted a joyous six million
copies in its 15-year history, and amassed
several mantelpieces of awards. ere’s a
games café close to where I work, and every
time I go in at least one table is playing some
version of Ticket to Ride. Every time.
Ticket to Ride was Alan R. Moon’s second
game to win the Spiel des Jahres, the most
important games award in the world. His rst
had been Elfenland in 1998, another game
of working out routes around a large map.
Many of his releases are, as Wikipedia dryly
observes, “board game
variations on the travelling
salesman problem”. at’s
not entirely fair; while
Elfenland is absolutely
about visiting as
many places as
possible with nite
resources, Ticket
to Ride is less of a
puzzle and much
more of a game.In Ticket to Ride you... we both know you
know the rules already, but I’m going to go
through the motions. You’re trying to complete
railway routes between di erent cities, with
longer routes worth more points. On your turn
you draw face-up or facedown train cards or
facedown destination cards, or trade a set of
matching train cards for enough plastic trains
to complete a track between two cities: part of14 April 2019
Words by James WallisTicket to Ride the Flood
All the
Jahres
Replaying the winners of the Spiel des Jahres so you don’t have to
Year of win: 2004
Designer: Alan R. Moon
Number of players: 2-
Playing time: 30-60 minutes
Worthy winner? Yes
Worth playing now? Yes
Availability: Wide
Price: £