PC Game: Ticket to Ride

[Brillig]

Ticket to Ride:A Review

I've been a subscriber to Computer Gaming World for over ten years. While the PC gaming scene has steadily been giving way to consoles, I still find CGW a worthwhile investment - not for the games that I would have gotten anyway, but for the look at games I would never have bothered with. Of course for that to work, I need to have confidence in their reviewers, and my experience is that their reviews are always solid.

Which leads us to today's look at Ticket to Ride, which garnered CGW's top rating (five stars). Ticket to Ride (hereafter TTR) is a port of the award-winning boardgame by the same name. Now if you're like me, you figure that board games reached their high-water mark with Monopoly, and probably died out entirely after, say, Pictionary. Well, guess again - the board game market, while still a niche, remains alive and well. Still, a board game port... the history on that hasn't exactly been stellar. However with CGW's ringing endorsement "it may actually play better on the PC" in my ears, I took the plunge.

Acquisition

The game is only available from its maker's website at www.daysofwonder.com. They sell both the PC and the board game, so make sure you're getting the right one! The price, $29.95, is quite reasonable for a PC game. Not quite bargain bin, but far less than the current $50 level. No problems ordering, and the game was delivered via USPS in a few days.

First Impressions

Hmm. There's no manual. Installation is quick, and there are a series of tutorials on the CD to give you a quick intro to the game mechanics. We'll get into those in much greater detail further on. After starting up the game, you'll notice a few things. One, poor graphics and sound - it runs at a fixed, low resolution (800 x 600, I think), the sound is composed of a few train-like sound effects and a couple of tinny (though not jarring) background music tracks. At this point, I'm beginning to be glad that I only paid $30 bucks.

Would you like to play a game?

Enough kvetching about sound and graphics. Civ IV to the contrary, strategy games should always be about the gameplay, first and foremost. So, let's talk about the game.

TTR is a railroad game - the objective is to connect cities by claiming railroads between them, and to score points thereby. At the end of the game, the player with the most points wins. Simple enough, right? Let's start by taking a look at the map...

Here be dragons

The game ships with three different maps, USA, Europe and Switzerland, each with slightly different rulesets. For purposes of this review, we'll focus on the US map, which has the most basic ruleset. The US map consists of roughly 35 cities (including 5 Canadian cities), with about 70 train routes between them. The train routes vary in length from 1 to 6 cars in length, and can be in one of eight colors, or grey, the "non-color." Those distinctions will become more important when we move on to discuss the actual gameplay.

The routes in the game mostly appear to correspond to historical railway routes, although I'm sure a real railway buff would find some bones to pick with them. Certain routes between cities are double-track, which allows for two players in the same game to claim the same route. (For balance reasons, allowing two players to claim the same route via double-track is only allowed in games with more than three players). Now let's look at the start of the game.

In the beginning

All games start the same way - each player receives four train cards, three railway tickets, and forty-five railway cars in that player's color. The train cards are dealt from a deck of 104 cards, twelve in each of the eight colors and eight locomotive or wild-cards that can be used as a card of any color. The ticket cards are dealt from their own deck - each ticket card has two cities on it, as well as a point value. At the end of the game, each player receives bonus points equal to the value on the ticket card if he has connected those two cities with his railroad. He also receives a point penalty equal to the value of the card if he fails to connect the cities.

Tickets are what give you your first guidance as to what your strategy should be in any given game. Although you are dealt three at the start of the game, you are allowed, at the beginning of the game, to discard one - so you aren't completely at the whim of fate. Further, during the game you have the opportunity to draw additional tickets. We'll talk more about that later.

The railway cars are what are placed on the map to indicate that you have claimed a train route. With a fixed number of cars, there is a limit to how many train routes you can claim - so even if your ambition reaches to the sky, you can't possibly claim every route on the map. In fact, since every route takes as many railway cars as it's length, you could run out of cars after only claiming eight routes.

Now that we've discussed the tools of the trade, let's pause a moment to talk about scoring.

Is someone keeping score?

Your score comes from three sources: tickets, trains, and a bonus for having the longest route. We discussed tickets above - the exact amount of points a ticket is worth appears to be the distance, based on the shortest possible route, between the two cities. The longest routes (and, therefore, the most valuable tickets), are the east-west transcontinental routes, which generally garner about twenty points. North-south routes tend to be more in the ten point range, and there are a variety of other, hard to categorize routes that fall into the five to fifteen point range.

The bonus for the longest route is simple enough - at the end of the game, the player with the longest contiguous route is awarded a bonus of ten points. Since the winning score on a USA map generally tends to be in the 100-120 point range, this is a significant, but not overwhelming bonus.

So, if you get thirty or forty points from tickets, and a possible ten for longest route, that means we haven't talked about the most important source of points yet. Trains! During the game, as you claim train routes, you also score points based on the length of the route (1 car = 1 point, 2 cars = 2 points, 3 cars = 4 points, 4 cars = 7 points, 5 cars = 10 points, and 6 cars gets a whopping 15 points). Since you have a limited supply of cars, obviously you want to claim as many long routes as you can - indeed, one of the computer opponents in the game focuses on getting as many long routes as possible - with seven six-car routes, and a three-car route, that's a potential 109 points, not shabby at all.

Enough talk, let's get down to business

The gameplay is simple enough, each player goes in turn, and may perform one of three actions:

1) Drawing train cards.
2) Using train cards to claim a route.
3) Drawing tickets.

Just for fun, we'll discuss these in reverse order. Drawing tickets allows you to shoot for more than the three initial routes that you were handed at the beginning of the game. When you draw tickets, you'll get three more tickets to consider - you must keep at least one of them. This makes drawing tickets an interesting strategic decision - early in the game, you generally have your hands full with your initial plan, so you're not necessarily looking for more things to think about. On the other hand, late in the game, you could draw tickets and find that all the destinations you need to get to are either blocked off by other people's routes, or too far away from your main network. In a sign of a well-designed game, you will find that connecting up your initial two or three tickets will leave you with some additional time and railway cars at the end of the game - so drawing tickets is a decision you'll have to make often.

Claiming a route is done by playing the train cards from your hand. As mentioned in the description of the map, some routes are color-coded, and those routes may only be claimed by playing the appropriate number (the same as the length) of train cards in the color of the route. The grey routes can be claimed by using any color, but they must still be a matched set, i.e., no using a green card and a red card to claim a route - the cards must be the same color. The locomotive cards are used as wild cards to complete any set.

Drawing train cards has a few wrinkles - first of all, when you draw train cards, you are allowed to draw two cards in your turn. After the initial set of train cards is dealt to the players, the first five cards remaining in the deck are turned face up, and when one of those cards is taken by a player, the top card in the deck is turned up to replace it. A player who draws train cards may choose to either take one of the face-up cards, or take the top card from the deck. (If a locomotive card is face-up, it counts as two cards drawn).

This leads to an interesting dilemma - by drawing from the deck, you get a chance to get a locomotive card at 'half-price' as it were, but at the cost of not being able to select the color of the train cards you're getting. Delving even further, once you're experienced with the game, you'll recognize that certain combinations of colors will telegraph to your opponents what tickets you're trying to complete. There's quite a bit of strategy hidden under the simple act of drawing cards.

Anyway, getting back to gameplay, the game continues with each player taking their turn, until one player claims a train route that takes him down to two or less railway cars remaining. At that point, the game is on it's last turn - each player gets to take one final turn, with the player that triggered the last turn getting the final turn of the game. This "variable end" has considerable ramifications as well - it means that even if no one is competing for the routes you want to complete, you can't just keep drawing cards, waiting for the perfect matches to get long routes, etc...

Strategery

TTR is like an onion - it has a lot of layers. On the outside, it's pretty simple (the boardgame is recommended for ages 7 and up after all). Draw cards, claim routes, complete tickets - nothing to it! Under the hood, though, there's considerable room for strategic maneuvering. With the risk of getting blocked out from your destination cities, there's always a tension between attempting to hide your goals and trying to complete them at the same time.

For example, while the color of cards you're drawing is an indicator of what you might be doing, actually claiming a route is a much bigger sign. Most games begin with the first several rounds of play consisting only of people drawing train cards. Once the first route is claimed, there's usually a frenzy of claiming that will go on in that area as people strive not to be locked out. Since your train routes do not have to be contiguous, one rather devious strategy involves claiming a small, 1 or 2 car route in the usually hotly contested Northeastern region - this, even though you have no tickets in the area. This will often result in the other players expending their arsenal of train cards snatching up the other routes in the region, leaving you with easy pickings over most of the rest of the board.

Ticket strategy is another big area - do you draw more tickets early, or late? Or never? Do you build multiple networks, forsaking the longest route bonus? Or do you try to connect everything at the risk of getting blocked off more easily? Decisions, decisions...

The late game sees a whole new set of considerations come into play, as you have to consider each player's remaining stock of railway cars, and how long the game is likely to last. You'll need to think about what tickets your opponents could have been going for, and what that means in terms of whether you're winning or losing - this, in order to determine if you should be trying to end the game, or trying to extend it (by drawing more tickets and completing them).

With a considerable number of decisions that come into play, one of the things that makes this game a pleasure to play with is that the average game will take around 20-25 minutes to play - with such a short time-frame, it's no hardship to try out various odd-ball strategies, as the next game is always right around the corner.

Going online

The game comes with online play, and a year's subscription to the Days of Wonder matchmaking service. The game seems to be very big in Europe, especially Germany (which is a haven for board games for reasons I've never understood). Online play is quite simple, and you can usually find a game to get into within a minute or two.

There appears to be some sort of trial mode you can get into via the Days of Wonder website, but I'm not sure what that entails. My guess is that you get to try a game or two online, but don't get the solo mode that the stand-alone game offers (or unlimited online play, naturally).

One thing that the game does lack is a hot-seat mode. I guess the feeling is, if you're going to play hot-seat, you might as well just buy the boardgame... and if you have kids, that might well be the way to go.

Wrapping up

Five stars? Well, perhaps not. Maybe four and a half. One thing the game lacks is the strong "just one more turn" feeling that, say Civ IV or GC II deliver. What this game has instead is a more subtle undercurrent of "just a quick game." Instead of the rather epic undertaking that more traditional computer strategy games represent, TTR has the casual, easy feel of something to do during a lunch break. Or a coffee break. Or a long boring meeting.

It's a solid and entertaining way to spend many a half-hour - and while it may not change your life, what more can you ask from a game?

[tyketime]

I've had the PC version of TTR for only a couple of weeks, but have also been pleasantly surprised with the board game port.

If you bought the board game directly from the publisher (as I did), you can buy the computer version for $20 instead of $30.

One thing I haven't noticed are variable levels of "AI". I've come in 2nd twice, but got CRUSHED in my last game when I couldn't complete my LA to Miami connection.

And each game takes somewhere between 20-30 minutes. So as Brillig said, it's a very manageable and entertaining way to spend your time.

[Yossarian]

I've been playing the boardgame version for little over a year. At christmas, I took TTR (the normal USA version) to my folks to play in leu of "shoot me now" monopoly.

My mum didn't fancy it at all, though my dad figured he'd give it a shot and convincer her to play. My bro's are gamers so we had a 5 player game.

MY GOD. they were hooked.

We played it three times that day and my mum made me leave it and ended up buying it off me (i replaced it with TTR Europe). They played it seven times in the following two days.

It's a *great* crossover board game - the kind of board game 'normals' like :-)

[Coffee Warlord]

Similar game to TTR is a board game called Power Grid. Still a relatively simple game, though much more in depth than ticket to ride.

Exceptionally fun board game, which I highly reccommend.