In Week 3 of the course, we were free to choose a game of our choosing to play for class and I of course chose my favorite board game: Ticket to Ride. I was excited to use what we’ve been learning in class to examine my favorite game in a new perspective, thinking about what exactly it is about how this game was designed that makes me enjoy it every time I play it.
Ticket to Ride is a 2-5 player game design by Alan R. Moon released in 2004. The game consists of a board displaying a map of the United States with roads connecting major cities across the country where the goal of the game is to have the most points by the end of the game. Points are awarded through multiple ways, with the most rewarding coming from completing tracks from one city to another according to the Destination Tickets. The other ways include building tracks on the map or having the longest continuous path, and the end of the game is decided when a player has reached 2 or less trains, resulting in one final round before the game is over.
In order to build tracks however, players must collect a certain number of Train cards that match the color and amount on the board. So for example, one would need to collect at least five Red Train cards if they’d like to build a path from Helena to Omaha. Grey spots allow players to use any colors as long as they match, and Rainbow Train cards may be used to represent any color.
To collect Train cards, players may pick up 2 cards from the card deck or only one Rainbow Card if it’s present on their turn. This ends up being the action most players take in the early stages of the game with the other ones being claiming a route (building a track) or drawing more Destination Tickets.
This of course is just a rough and simple summary of Ticket to Ride’s main rules, but I believe it is enough information for me to discuss the wonders of its mechanics that allow this game to succeed. I’d like to discuss how the ability of having limited actions to choose from as well as having to slowly build your hand and plan what routes to take allow for this game to build this unique sense of competition within play sessions that I have yet to see in other games.
Normally, in other “dominating”-like games (or games where the goal is to own the most of something to succeed), a lot happens in one turn. For example in Monopoly, the play style is fast as players roll dice and move across the board with money constantly flowing in and out of players hands. And in Catan, each dice roll guarantees resources for someone and a chance for a player to expand or upgrade their towns or bargain with others.
In these games, things are constantly occurring which contrast to Ticket to Ride’s play style and pace, and yet Ticket to Ride is able to have the same level of strategy that I personally find more enjoyable. This is because Ticket to Ride makes players play at slow pace which forces them to have to wait before they are able to see their gains. As I said earlier, there are three actions to choose from: take Train cards, build a route, or take more Destination Tickets. And when you choose to take a Train card, you’re only able to take 2 if they’re not Rainbow Trains. Since the most efficient rails to complete your route tend to include the longest paths, this leads to a slow game where players have to rely on the randomness of the cards on the deck to hopefully collect the trains they need to complete their path, otherwise they risk losing points for failing this task. There is also the fear that another player may block off the path you were going to take, making the track you’ve been working on completely worthless and forcing you to take a roundabout route if you still hope to complete that route.
With the games slow pace, players are put against each other in a fight for resources and time. Time because you want to claim the most valuable and efficient tracks before another player does, but also resources because since the process of obtaining Train cards is slow and relies on the luck of the deck, you will have to think twice before using them to complete a path. This leads to players having to consider and balance risks of what action they decide to take or what route they’re building early in the game.
For example, while I could use three Orange Train cards to go from Las Vegas to Salt Lake City right now, I could also save my three cards and use them in the track from Helena to Duluth which will become essential for a late-game route. Waiting until I have these cards however would risk that initial Vegas-to-S.L.C route, leaving it up for grabs for any of my opponents to take and forcing me to use my resources to recover.
This level of strategizing and risk taking is what makes this game so fun and exciting, especially as one tries to speculate what route others may be taking so you can decide if you’ll need to intercept their paths to complete your own. You’re also just free to block anyone’s path at any time if you want just as my sister did to me late into our game, forcing me to spend extra turns and resources to reroute myself. When I asked her why she committed such a heinous act of treachery, she said she was tired of me completing my routes and knew she wasn’t going to be able to finish hers, so in her eyes the only viable option was to be a menace and mess with everyone’s routes including mine.
Once she realized she couldn’t be on the top, her play style and priorities changed, allowing her to still enjoy and take action in the game even when put in a situation where winning was out of her reach. Ticket to Ride brings the inner strategizer and plotters inside of us, and sometimes even trouble makers! All of this was only possible because of how the game forces players to slow down and progress slowly, relying on patience and late-game strategy as their best bet in succeeding this race to dominate the rails.
