Game Preview: Ticket to Ride Card Game

By W. Eric Martin
February 25, 2008

Publisher: Days of Wonder
Designer: Alan R. Moon
Players: 2-4
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Release Date: May 2008
Price: $25 / €15

The Ticket to Ride train keeps on rolling with a new line into the card game arena. The Ticket to Ride Card Game includes many of the familiar elements of the board game – drawing locomotives and eight types of train cards, playing cards, drawing tickets – but adds new elements of game play, including a chance to attack another player’s holdings.

Invisible Rails

As you might expect in a card game, there’s no gameboard and consequently no map of the United States with spaces for plastic trains to connect pairs of cities. With no spaces for trains, the trains themselves are obviously absent as well. So what do you get in the box?

The Ticket to Ride Card Game includes 10 train cards in each of eight colors, 16 locomotive cards, 46 ticket cards, and six bonus cards. Each player starts with a locomotive and seven train cards, while the rest of the trains and locomotives are shuffled and laid out as in the original game: five cards face-up with a face-down deck.

Players also receive six destination tickets; they must keep at least one, and any they reject are shuffled back into the deck. The trains needed to connect the two cities on the ticket are represented by the colored circles in the left-hand corner. (The images in the upper-right are for the color blind.)

Riding and Robbing

On your turn, you take one of three actions:

1. Draw cards. If you draw a face-up locomotive, that’s your only card for the turn; otherwise you draw two cards from the deck or face-up display.

2. Draw tickets. You draw four, keep any number of them (even zero), and return unwanted ones to the bottom of the deck.

3. Play cards into your railyard. Each player has a personal railyard, and when you choose this option you can play either (a) two or more cards of the same color (including locomotives) or (b) exactly three cards of different colors (and no locomotives). If you choose the first option, locomotives go on top of the stack; if you choose the second option, the color of the train cards can’t match those of any already in your railyard.

   What’s more, you can’t play a color of train card already in another player’s railyard unless you play more of them. So if Alan already has one or more green train cards in his railyard, you can’t play a green card as part of a trio and you can’t play a set of green cards unless you play more than he has. In the latter case, you’ve just committed a train robbing and Alan has to discard all of his green cards (including any locomotives in that stack).

How do you keep opponents from robbing your trains? And where do the tickets come into play? Well, at the start of your turn, before you take one of the three actions, you may choose to take one card from each row of train cards in your railyard and place them face-down in your On-the-Track stack. You may not look through this stack during the game.

Toting Up the Tickets

With two or three players, the game ends once the deck of train cards runs out, with each player having one final turn. Players then reveal their On-the-Track stacks and fulfill as many tickets as possible, discarding one train card or locomotive for each of the colored circles on the ticket they want to fulfill. (With four players, an intermediate scoring takes place when the train card deck empties, then you reshuffle and run through the train deck one more time before ending the game with another scoring of tickets.)

Whoever completes the most tickets to each of the six bonus cities (New York, Miami, Dallas, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles) claims that bonus card; if players tie in connections to a bonus city, they each score the number of points shown on the bonus card.

Players sum the points shown on their completed tickets and any bonus cards claimed, then subtract the points for any tickets they failed to complete. Whoever scores the most points wins, with ties being broken by the tied player who completed the most tickets.

Says Moon, “The game is a little nastier with more players because there is more train robbing. With fewer players, you draw more tickets because you’ll have more cards to complete them.”

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Comments:

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Why oh why does it not support 5 players, argh.  My group is 5 players about 95% of the time, and I hate seeing what look to be fun games only supporting 4.  Argh. Looks interesting, as much as my group loves TtR this would be a sure hit if it supported 5. Posted by Jonathan Greisz on Feb 25, 2008 at 08:16 AM | #

5 players will be part of the first expansion set. :-) Posted by Peter Stein on Feb 26, 2008 at 11:51 AM | #

Hi Jonathan, The prototype was originally for up to 6. But the games just lasted too long and required a deck with way too many cards. Plus, the downtime between turns seemed a little too long for a card game. Traditionally, card games are for four or less players, and with 4 or less, the TICKET TO RIDE card game is very quick and players often want to play two or more games in a row. You can always buy two copies of the game and make a bigger deck to play with 5 or 6. I don’t really recommend this, but it will work fine. No Expansion planned at the moment. But yanevaknow. Enjoy, Alan Posted by Alan R. Moon on Feb 26, 2008 at 05:34 PM | #

This looks great!  Count me in as interested. Posted by Robert Ramirez on Feb 26, 2008 at 07:04 PM | #

Alan, It’s definitely on my buy list, but probably won’t get played too much as we always seem to have 5.  We’ll just have to stick with the base game when we have 5, which the group loves.  Maybe the card game will become my travel game as I travel at least once a month for work.  :) Keep up the great work.  BTW, a reprint of Elfengold would be much in demand in my group.  :) Posted by Jonathan Greisz on Feb 26, 2008 at 08:23 PM | #

"BTW, a reprint of Elfengold would be much in demand in my group.” You have to talk Jay Tummelson about that one. Alan Posted by Alan R. Moon on Feb 26, 2008 at 09:53 PM | #

I am looking forward to this game and this is a great review. It looks fun and fast. However, when reading through the above review and rules on DoW I noticed an error here - There is a KEY one word mistake “you may choose” should read “you MUST” in reference to the On-the-track stack. I know it is a minor thing to notice, but may choose, makes it optional - and Must means it is required. Posted by Steve Ames on Mar 21, 2008 at 01:46 PM | #

Thanks for the note, Steve. I had received an early copy of the rules, and at that time you could choose to leave cards in your railyard. The unwritten rule of previews is that everything is subject to change prior to publication. I believe that the game also now comes with a small pink rabbit that you have to punch every time you complete a ticket. Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on Mar 21, 2008 at 01:57 PM | #

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