Ticket to Ride is an absolutely top-notch game with broad appeal, playing in less than an hour and providing a lot of depth without being complicated. Players must make a variety of strategic and tactical choices, giving it considerable replay value.
Players compete to build railroads across the United States and Canada in Ticket to Ride, both developing their own plans and disrupting the plans of others. The board -- which lives up to the gorgeous standards now expected from publisher Days of Wonder -- shows cities connected by rail lines of 1 to 6 in length.
At the start of the game, each player is given three goal cards; each goal card lists two cities that the player will try to connect (e.g. Los Angeles to Pittsburgh, or El Paso to Winnipeg). Players must keep at least two of the three goal cards, but may choose to keep all three. At the end of the game, you get positive points if you've connected your cities and negative points if you haven't (longer routes are, naturally, more valuable but also more risky).
Each player is then dealt four train cards, which come in the colors of the tracks on the board. On your turn, you may (1) draw two more train cards, or (2) play a set of cards that matches a line on the board and build trains on that line. Players earn points for each line built, with longer lines being worth more than shorter lines. A third option is to draw three new goal cards, keeping at least one. This continues until one player has less than three train cars remaining, when each player gets one more turn before the final scores are calculated.
Ticket to Ride quickly earned a place among my favorite games, one of only a very few to receive 5 stars. I give it an enthusiastic recommendation.
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