LogFAQs > #967724172

17. Ticket to Ride

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9209/ticket-ride

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Route-building, card drafting
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 40-60 minutes
First played: 2015
Experience: 8-15 plays with 2-5 players (including one each of Europe and Africa)

On a shared map - the original being the USA - players draw cards to build rail routes between cities. Each route needs to be filled using a certain number of same-colored train cards. Players gain points for laying track - the longer the track the better payout per train car - and for fulfilling their personal (secret) route tickets. Your turn is either drafting train cards (via a facedown deck or a faceup offer), taking a new route ticket, or laying a single track.

So many of the games on my list are rough on the first go and have managed to work their way up into hall of fame territory. Ticket to Ride is a stone-cold classic, dating back to 2001 and probably the second-most famous hobby game today after Settlers of Catan. It was one of my first hobby games, and I found its runtime long and the gameplay somewhat inoffensive, but not particularly pleasant. It took too long to do anything, and the game didn't need to be as long as it was, and blocking sucked, and I hated waiting for my turn. My games of Europe and Africa in the next year and a half didn't change my opinion much.

I've played a lot more eurogames since then, including several games more of TTR. My opinion has changed big time in that timespan, and I think it 100% has to do with playing the game way faster. There is technically a large decision space in TTR, but an experienced eye/attentive gamer can effectively reduce that decision space to like two or three decent options and wing it. When 80% of the turns take under fifteen seconds, the downtime shrinks to near-nothing, and suddenly the game is incredibly engaging. Instead of feeling passive-aggression, I can joke about what's happening in a relaxing way and laugh if I get blocked or someone else gets blocked. Similarly with Splendor, I feel like simple passive-aggressive euros get a ton better when played quickly and without too much concern about the outcome.

And as a result, I've actually requested TTR recently. The game is legitimately beautiful in a "classic eurogame" way - instead of having beautiful art on individual tableaux - in its own way pretty - you've instead got brightly contrasting trains criss-crossing a very sizable map. And if you draw your turns quickly, you spend less time "heads down" thinking about your hand and more "heads up" sweating out the board. And man, the game really sings much more.

The original TTR has one undeniable weakness, which is that its cards are micro-sized. Fortunately, future editions largely use standard-sized cards and avoid giving hand cramps. TTR is one of the three "classic gateway" games alongside Catan and Carcassonne, and these days, it's the one I'd most rather play.