Game Review: Ticket to Ride: The Card Game

By W. Eric Martin
May 23, 2008

Publisher: Days of Wonder
Designer: Alan R. Moon
Players: 2-4
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Rules Language: English/Italian/Dutch
Price: €15 / $25

Version played: Production copy
Times played: Nine, evenly spread among 2-4 players

When Ticket to Ride: The Card Game first appeared on the horizon – due to a goof by Spanish publisher Edge Entertainment that placed the game in its catalog prior to Days of Wonder’s announcement – reaction was split between giddy excitement at the thought of another TtR game and eye-rolling ennui coupled with suggestions that DoW is milking a cash cow with an unnecessary product.

As if any game is necessary.

As if you’re being forced to buy it.

Like Father, Like Son

After numerous games, it’s clear why Ticket to Ride: The Card Game bears the name that it does. The game feels a lot like its parent: You select cards, you draw tickets, you time your plays to avoid being blocked while trying to shut down others. The clock is ticking as players burn through the deck, which serves as the game’s timer. While rushing toward that unknown goalpost somewhere on the horizon, you try to time everything just right so that you’ve expended all your energy punting tickets successfully between the uprights while opponents are either still building steam or stuck at half-field.

(For a rundown of the rules, head to the game preview that I wrote in February.)

With no gameboard, and therefore no geographic element to the tickets beyond a pair of city names, the game does feel more abstract than Ticket to Ride. The tickets show sets of colored circles, and you need to collect those colors in order to score points. By losing the map, you lose the satisfaction that comes with building something, even something as minor and temporary as an abstract pattern of plastic trains.

What you gain, though, is more direct competition. By removing the gameboard, you raise your gaze to the other players to see how much ammunition they’re holding and whether they can respond to your threats. You place the colored train cards in your trainyard – either a trio of differently-colored cards or 2+ cards of the same color including jokers – and wait to see whether someone will muscle you out of a color before your next turn. If not, you scoop up one card of each color, take your turn like normal, and wait for the hammer to fall next time.

The cards that make it through this gantlet are placed in a private stash, and those are the only cards that matter when it comes time to fulfill tickets. This stash remains secret, even from you, until the end of the game, and while you can try to remember everything that makes it into the pile, the two-step process of playing cards into your railyard, then converting them turn by turn – possibly losing part of your holdings in the process – subverts your memory. What’s built and what’s in inventory no longer match, putting you in the position of a business owner who has to judge on the fly whether you can satisfy customer demands, whether you need more stock – or whether you can take on more orders and hope to get the goods in time.

Fighting for Seats

The level of tension in Ticket to Ride: The Card Game depends on the number of players. With two players, only one person plays between each of your turns, so you’re rarely worried about how badly the opponent can hurt you. Instead you’re stashing cards like crazy and constantly reaching for more tickets. You play for control of the Big City bonuses at the end of the game, trying to hit each of the six cities enough times to edge your opponent out of the top spot or at least tie for control of the train lines. Each of the Big Cities are tied to a color (Dallas – green, Miami – red, and so on), and repeatedly knocking an opponent out of a color either strands those tickets in her hand or forces her to burn jokers to satisfy them.

Cards played but not stashed by the end of the round are lost, and with four players, you play through the card deck twice, giving you two opportunities to mess up the timing or use it to your advantage. Having three players follow you each turn means that your holdings will get dinged more often than not, so plan judiciously. Pay attention to what others are picking up because losing a chunk of three or four cards at a time – which has happened more than once in each four-player game – forces you to ride backwards to pick up what dropped, losing ground on everyone else.

At the halfway point in a four-player game, players score what tickets they can, then dump any remaining cards in their stash. By eyeing what others have completed, you can judge your chances of succeeding with the Big City bonuses. You can stockpile dozens of cards in the first round and play nothing in order to avoid giving anything away, but the shrunken deck in the second round puts you under a tight clock, giving you less time to play and process cards while others draw like fiends to punish your frugalness.

While Ticket to Ride: The Card Game might be unnecesary – like anything that isn’t food, water and oxygen – it replicates the spirit of the original game in a fresh way, giving TtR fans something new, yet familiar, to enjoy and non-fans something new, yet familiar, to complain about. Everybody wins!

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