Ticket to Ride

MosBen

I've only recently gotten into board gaming. Well, beyond the games everyone played growing up. I love Pandemic, Dominion, Shadows Over Camelot, and a few others, but a friend told me that Ticket to Ride is an absolutely essential game to pick up. I looked it up and there are a seemingly a million versions out there. How do they differ? Are the versions played together, or do you keep them separate? What should I pick up first? Second?

Bedlam

I went to a game night and played the american and european versions. They have a different map (obviously) and Europe has a tunnel system where you have to rely a bit on luck to build some routes. Otherwise they were played seperatly but with the same basic rules.

Personally I liked america better. It was a tad simplier and I knew were locations were since it uses real american cities.

Alistair Hutton

MosBen wrote:

I've only recently gotten into board gaming. Well, beyond the games everyone played growing up. I love Pandemic, Dominion, Shadows Over Camelot, and a few others, but a friend told me that Ticket to Ride is an absolutely essential game to pick up. I looked it up and there are a seemingly a million versions out there. How do they differ? Are the versions played together, or do you keep them separate? What should I pick up first? Second?

All the ticket to Ride games are stand-alone.

Ticket to Ride (also known as Ticket to Ride USA) is the original, there is an expansion for it called 1910 which is pretty close to an essential purchase imho. This is the simplest version of ticket to ride by far and I'd recommend starting here. If you like what you play here and want more heft you can putchase a differnt edition. If you don't like the base mechanics of card collection and route claiming then none of the ticket to rides is going to be your cup of tea.
Ticket to Ride Europe is the least well regarded of all the TTR's, adding a bit of extra complexity without adding much extra fun. It has an expansion called 1912, don't know what that does to the game.
Ticket To Ride Malkin marks a big change adding the intriguing Passenger mechanic which really mixes up how you approach the game. I really liked this a lot when I played it but I had played it after playing a lot of original Ticket to Ride so YMMV.
Ticket to Ride Nordic is specificalyl designed for 2-3 players (the other games are 2 - 5 players), it's well regarded but I think that the Original game with the 1910 Expansion so that you can play big cities is an excellent 2 or 3 player game as is so I wouldn't go out of my way to get Nordic just for the superiour 2-3 player gameplay.

MosBen

Thanks for the tips, guys. I've been lucky enough to have a group of friends get into board gaming right at the same time, so we've been able to amass a decently sized collection of games fairly quickly. Unfortunately, I'm probably going to move away soonish and my collection will have to stand on its own, so I'm trying to be smarter about which games are essential pickups.

blahmcblah

Alistair Hutton wrote:

All the ticket to Ride games are stand-alone.

TtR: Switzerland and the new Asian and Indian maps are not standalone. They require you have a copy of USA or Europe, as they do not come with trains or train cards.

Alistair Hutton wrote:

Ticket to Ride Europe is the least well regarded of all the TTR's, adding a bit of extra complexity without adding much extra fun.

Highest ranked on BGG = least well regarded? It's hands-down my favorite of the series. I'll agree that USA becomes very good with the 1910 expansion, and might be where you should start anyway, but I still think Europe is the best. Haven't played it with Europa 1912, however.

Alistair Hutton

blahmcblah wrote:

Highest ranked on BGG = least well regarded?

Pah! What does the internet know?

Cadmus

Personal preference
I've played USA and Europe, myself and all my friends agree that USA is a waste of money and Europe is amazing. Of course, this is just our opinions.

We tend to like a bit more complex games and are fairly competitive. We play shadows over camelot, dominion and pandemic all the time but we consider them to be a bit simpler, less thought intense, games.

Hope that helps give you a better idea of which you'd prefer.

Comparing USA and Europe versions
The USA version has a lot more long routes, what this means is you can be totally screwed over. If someone builds on one of the routes you really need, there aren't a lot of options to get around it. The Europe version has a lot more short, interconnected, routes so if someone builds on a route you needed you can usually find another way to still get where you needed to go.

If nobody is really playing to win or think about their strategy a lot, USA is probably better. If you like playing fairly competitively you might feel like winning the USA version is based more on luck than anything else.

Squid56

Question about the actual board game. I've only played this on the XBox 360 (got all the expansions) and while very entertaining, I was wondering if the interface tradeoffs required to play multi-person on a single console impacted the strategy portion too much. Specifically, do players in the actual board game reveal their destination cards & keep them face up in their play space? The XBox version not only keeps the players destination tickets face up but also conveniently highlights all possible destination cities during a players turn. This makes it fairly easy for other players to gauge which routes the competition will be needing to take and allows for all sorts of tom foolery.

Bedlam

We played with hidden destination cards so I think the xbox version would be abnormal.

Cadmus

Squid56 wrote:

Question about the actual board game. I've only played this on the XBox 360 (got all the expansions) and while very entertaining, I was wondering if the interface tradeoffs required to play multi-person on a single console impacted the strategy portion too much. Specifically, do players in the actual board game reveal their destination cards & keep them face up in their play space? The XBox version not only keeps the players destination tickets face up but also conveniently highlights all possible destination cities during a players turn. This makes it fairly easy for other players to gauge which routes the competition will be needing to take and allows for all sorts of tom foolery.

Ya, destination cards should all be hidden. Half the game is figuring out a good route to cover as many destinations as possible. Having all possible destinations highlight would make it pretty mindless imo.