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Hello Dakka.

I've always wnated to play ticket to ride looks interetsing.

Basically I'm going ot stay with my GF's parents this weekend and we're going to play Ticket to Ride. They play it loads and I've never played it. I want to smash them all at it xD

Can anyone provide a run down of how the game plays and know of any solid strategy that will put me on the road (rails) to victory?

If you have an iDevice, there's a version of Ticket to Ride int he app store for a couple bucks. Good to get the basic strategy down...

I've only played that version and a big demo at GenCon (literally... They had the board printed at least 200% size and used giant oversized train tokens). My best 'strategy' seems to be to spend several turns building up a 'stock' of cards, then play a bunch of routes to avoid someone blocking you. Make sure you complete your routes.

The game is pretty simple to explain. Each player starts with a couple routes (draw 3 random cards, must keep 1, can keep all 3) that give two cities and a point value. Connect these cities, get those points at end-of-game. Fail in a selected route, and subtract those points.

Each player, on their turn, can either draw from the train deck, draw from the route deck, or play trains to build routes. Drawing from the route deck gets you new routes to complete similar to beginning of game: draw 3, must keep at least 1.

Drawing trains is interesting as there's a deck (blind draws) and a few face-up train cards. you can choose 2 from the face up or blind stack, UNLESS you choose a rainbow 'wild' train from the face-up cards. Draw a random card from the blind stack and you still get your second pick.

You build routes by matching the desired route (a connection between two cities) with cards from your hand. Want a 3-card route in orange? play three orange cards. Substitute 'rainbow' wild cards for any or all of these. Some routes just require cards of the same color (or wild cards). You also get points for these: longer routes are more valuable than shorter routes.

It is possible to see cities closed off if other players buy off all the connections. Note that some cities have 'parallel' routes. Two 'lanes' next to each other. These cannot be bought by the same player, so a player can't buy an entire city just to be annoying.

Fun game, and I might buy a copy if I thought I'd play it regularly.

TL; DR: Watch Wil Wheaton's Tabletop episode on Ticket to Ride

Also note that in the link Balance provided, Wil's wife Anne Wheaton slams the table and ruins the game... sorta it's a good watch. I can't wait for the extended version to be released

chuxfm wrote:
Hello Dakka.

I've always wnated to play ticket to ride looks interetsing.

Basically I'm going ot stay with my GF's parents this weekend and we're going to play Ticket to Ride. They play it loads and I've never played it. I want to smash them all at it xD

Can anyone provide a run down of how the game plays and know of any solid strategy that will put me on the road (rails) to victory?

TtR is a great game. If you have an iPhone, you can pick up the app version and get some quick games in. That'd probably help characterize the strategies involved better than anyone could describe them.

Not sure how familiar you are with the game, but in general, you’re trying to complete tickets which connect two cities together. You start with 2-3 tickets and can draw more. Taking your initial tickets is the first real decision point of the game. You draw them at random and then chose which ones to start with from that draw. Based on that draw, you’re generally looking at either short, easy (and not very profitable) tickets or long, hard, ones (like New York to LA) which will take a good chunk of the game to complete. Where you can, pick tickets that can be met with some common track so you can maximize your efforts.

Each turn you either build up your hand of tracks (used to build the tracks you’ll need), actually building tracks or else getting new tickets. There’s some tough calls there. Some of the longer track segments are hard to complete (and you can never get that last right color card when you need it) so deciding which to do when is the real challenge. You have to balance them out, and that’s really only learned through playing the game.

Just a couple of pointers though…

First, find out what kind of players you’re facing. Some people play a very civilized game and don’t snag choke points out of spite. My wife still gets ticked off if I block her just to block her. Others will just go for the jugular. If it’s the latter, be very careful about tipping your hand on which chokepoints you need until you’re ready to go. There are a few killers that only take a couple of cards to block.

Second, be very careful about picking up new tickets late in the game. You can get stuck with tickets you cannot fulfill and that’ll kill your score. If s someone's down to <10 trains left in their pile, and they have any cards in their hand, make sure you have a close eye on your end game strategy, cuz it's coming.

Third, it’s galling, but don’t be afraid to take a face-up wild card if you don’t see anything you need. Sure it costs you a second draw, and sometimes it’s better to draw two face-down cards, but often I’ve found you just end up gathering too many “ones-y” cards that don't help you when you need that 6th <pick a color> card.

Finally, always have alternate tracks in mind in case you get blocked. You’ll need ‘em! Even if folks are "playing nice" certain corridors are just too crowded not to get blocked. You have to be ready to adapt.

But it’s a great game. And, seriously, if you can get the App do it! It’s cheap and, without the shuffling and everything that otherwise slows the game down, you can get a game against 2-4 computer opponents down in ~15 minutes at most. You’ll learn more about how to balance drawing and building, managing tickets, and how to structure your rails through playing than you’d ever get from anyone trying to tell you about it.

Valete,

JohnS

Here are the rules, they can be read in about 20 min.

http://cdn1.daysofwonder.com/tickettoride/en/img/tt_rules_en.pdf

For beginners I recommend a short and medium destination if possible.

Pay attention to where your opponents are placing trains, in particular if they are starting to get long, try to block them from potential destination, it is best to block with shorter rail lines, 2 or 3 to save your or trains.

When you have a good lay out of trains, about 50 to 70 percent of your trains are gone, you may want to consider picking up some extra tickets.

The 'end of game' rules are interesting and important to understand. Basically, when any player goes under a threshold of remaining train tokens (which are 'public' knowledge) every player gets one last turn, including the player who triggered the last round. So if I build a route on my turn and am left with only a few trains, everyone else gets a turn, then I get one final turn to use up my remaining trains. I've noticed (in the iPod version) it's basically a rush to finish a last route or build the longest route possible to try to squeeze a few more points out.

0-2 trains triggers the end of game one last turn for everyone else.


So yes, keep an eye out. Screwed my self once with 15 or so train cars left.