Hello. Hope you had a good festive season/new year and all that. I trust you ate lots of calorific food and watched plenty of mildly disappointing Christmas television. I know I did. And on top of this, with all the usual stresses we enjoy when staying with our families, I had to force people to play board games so that I can write about them for this reliably underwhelming website [hey! -ed]. What fun. Well, it was actually. Surprisingly. In fact, my cynical brood were quite taken with this month’s title. It’s about trains and collecting sets of coloured cards. It’s…
Ticket to Ride is one of those big board gaming successes. It’s won a tonne of prizes from all over the world and, along with Catan and Carcassonne, it’s consistently the highest seller according to Esdevium who are the largest board gaming distributor in the UK. It has a wodge of expansions and even a popular iThing thing. But these baubles impress me not. Is it really any good? Is it? And if so, how is it good? And why? And whom?
I had Ticket to Ride and Fortune and Glory to play with the family over Christmas. More on the latter next month, but it’s essentially an Indiana Jones board game: set in the 30s, you go around the world competing for lost artefacts, fighting Nazis and overcoming all the perils that accompany raiding ancient temples. This, I thought, would be a big hit. It’s EXCITING. There’s fighting and guns and miniatures, camp artwork and little plastic gold tokens all wrapped up with delightfully ridiculous pulp fluff. It’s a game that sells itself, right?
Well, my fickle family preferred Ticket To Ride. The snivelling, casual gaming underachievers. No, it’s fine – character sheets and dice roll checks aren’t for everyone. And as my brother said, some games just have a good ‘atmosphere’. There’s something airy and relaxing about Ticket’s simplicity, the ease with which you can grasp it, the… benign nature of its content – building railways. As you look down on a map of the United States, charged with criss-crossing its mighty, empty breadth with networks of railways in the age of steam, there is something.
Let me tell you a little about what you have to do.
You win by collecting the most points at the end of the game. You get points by completing railways between cities. They come in various lengths and you get more points for completing the longer ones. To complete a railway you have to collect the right number of these train carriage cards in the same colour.
Some routes on the board need a specific colour, some are grey and can be any colour. You start the game with a hand of four carriage cards and each round you can either draw more carriage cards from the big shuffled deck of carriages, spend a set of cards to build a route, claiming it, and the points, on the board with your little plastic carriage pieces, or grab additional ‘ticket’ cards:
This is Ticket’s risk and reward element; these cards give the game a bit of piquancy. What they do is tell you to complete certain routes across the board, if you complete them you get bonus points to add to your score at the end of the game. A short route, Duluth to Oklahoma for example, might give you an extra nine points. A massive stretch from Los Angeles to New York might give you 21. But, if you fail to complete your route by the end of the game, you lose the number of points written on the ticket. You start the game with at least two ticket cards, and if you pick more up during the game you draw three and must keep at least one.
The thing is, these ticket cards are kept secret from your opponents. You don’t know if someone’s just laying a route for a few points, or placing the first track of a high scoring rail network. There’s the encouragement, then, to cut your opponents off, intersect with their routes and generally get in their way in the most unsporting manner possible. It won’t show until the end of the game, until everyone reveals their ticket cards to show whether they’ve got a handful of bonus points or a load of penalties. There’s the excitement of Ticket to Ride. That’s it. There you go. Haroo.
You’re not blown away? Well mightn’t may you not be aren’t. But it’s a game that’s supposed to take about half an hour and be dead easy to learn. And it is actually fairly tense. When it comes down to the wire, and the game’s about to end, you’ve got one yellow carriage card to collect before you can lay another line and secure a valuable ticket route but this all rides on nobody noticing a rather conspicuous line you’ve drawn in plastic carriages across the United States that will obviously be completed in your next turn… will anyone work it out and block you off before the card you need turns up in the deck? Will it/they??
So it’s a game about steam trains in the early twentieth century which basically revolves around collecting cards of the right colour. It doesn’t sound thrilling, sure, but you can’t argue with its success – it is a perfectly formed, refined board game. Thing is, a board game can be the most fun, exciting sounding thing in the world but it’s worthless if people get fed-up before they’ve even learned to play it and groan the minute you ever mention its name. I wasn’t particularly expecting to, but I’ve enjoyed Ticket To Ride. I don’t know if I’d be that bothered about picking up any of the numerous expansions, but the core game is nice and cheap and fits into the “games to play with family or girlfriend with low tolerance for genestealers, zombies and cyclopean horrors” category. And who hates trains? No one, that’s what.
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Board games, board games, board games. Buy board games in shops, use this! Buy them online, use this! Or, y’know. Don’t buy them. Bye!
