Tabletop_Gaming__April_2019

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success, and even if you lose dramatically

(which, dear reader, I did) you still feel that

you’ve had a good time, and you don’t feel bitter

towards any particular player for beating you

• not even the robber-baron who completed
  Portland-Salt Lake City while you were still
  waiting for the last blue card you needed. Call
  the café sta over, order more drinks and some
  nachos, and have another go.

Next month: Take a risk gathering gems at the

edge of a waterfall in 2005 winner, Niagara.

Of course, that could be an advantage.
Ticket to Ride wasn’t the rst train game
to win the Spiel des Jahres, not even the rst
designed by a Brit. (Alan Moon was born in
Southampton; he moved to America aged
seven but he still counts.) at was 1984
winner Railway Rivals designed by
David Watts, tragically out of print in
English since the Games Workshop
edition of the same year. Brits used to
be good at making trains, now we’re good
at train games; Francis Tresham created
the 18XX series, Martin Wallace did Age of
Steam and Tony Boydell did Snowdonia.
Here’s the big secret about Ticket to Ride:
it isn’t about trains, not really. It’s a set-
collection game, a cousin of rummy, with
a route-completion mechanic tacked on for
scoring and to give players short, medium and
long-term goals. Does that matter? Not in the
slightest when the blend of elements is arranged
and balanced with this perfect nesse.
As games players and games designers, we
talk a lot about mechanics and balance and
randomness distribution and cognitive load and
the other parts of the structure of games, the
engineering that makes them work. Something
we talk about far less are our emotional
reactions to a game: the satisfaction we get from
arranging bits of wood and cardboard, the little

bit of magic that means we don’t mind losing if

the game itself was good. ‘Fun’ is part of it, but

‘fun’ has been part of the academic equation of

what makes games work since Dutch cultural

philosopher Johan Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens

in 1938. We don’t have a vocabulary to describe

what makes a game pleasing, at least not in

English. It’s like umami, the fth taste: it’s always

been there but if you don’t have the words to

describe it then it’s hard to talk about.

But whatever it is and however it happens,

Ticket to Ride has it in spades. It’s very satisfying

to play. Every route you complete is a little

wasn’t the rst train game
to win the Spiel des Jahres, not even the rst
designed by a Brit. (Alan Moon was born in
Southampton; he moved to America aged
seven but he still counts.) at was 1984

be good at making trains, now we’re good
at train games; Francis Tresham created
Age of
Snowdonia

Everything’s a choice, and

none of the choices are

obvious or uninteresting.