Category: Ω Board Games

Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails takes the familiar gameplay of Ticket to Ride and expands it across the globe — which means that you’ll be moving across water, of course, and that’s where the sails come in.

As in other Ticket to Ride games, in Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails players start with tickets in hand that show two cities, and over the course of the game they try to collect colored cards, then claim routes on the game board with their colored train and ship tokens, scoring points while doing so. When any player has six or fewer tokens in their supply, each player takes two more turns, then the game ends. At that point, if they’ve created a continuous path between the two cities on a ticket, then they score the points on that ticket; if not, then they lose points instead.

Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails puts a few twists on the TtR formula, starting with split card decks of trains and ships (with all of the wild cards going in the train deck). Three cards of each type are revealed at the start of the game, and when you draw cards, you replace them with a card from whichever deck you like. (Shuffle the card types separately to form new decks when needed.)

Similarly, players choose their own mix of train and ship tokens at the start of the game. To claim a train route (rectangular spaces), you must play train cards (or wilds) and cover those spaces with train tokens, and to claim a ship route (oval spaces), you must play ship cards (or wilds) and cover those spaces with ship tokens. Ship cards depict one or two ships on them, and when you play a double-ship card, you can cover one or two ship spaces. You can take an action during play to swap train tokens for ships (or vice versa), and you lose one point for each token you swap.

Some tickets show tour routes with multiple cities instead of simply two cities. If you build a network that matches the tour exactly, you score more points than if you simply include all of those cities in your network.

Each player also starts the game with three harbors. If you have built a route to a port city, you can take an action during the game to place a harbor in that city (with a limit of one harbor per port). To place the harbor, you must discard two train cards and two ship cards of the same color, all of which must bear the harbor symbol (an anchor). At the end of the game, you lose four points for each harbor not placed, and you gain 10-40 points for each placed harbor depending on how many of your completed tickets show that port city.

Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails includes a double-sided game board, with one side showing the world and the other side showing the Great Lakes of North America. Players start with a differing number of cards and tokens depending on which side they play, and each side has a few differences in gameplay.

Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 4 – Nederland contains a new game board with new rules for use with Ticket to Ride or Ticket to Ride: Europe with players now creating train lines in the Netherlands.

The basics of TtR gameplay remain the same as always — players collect train cards in order to claim routes between pairs of cities with the overall goal of completing tickets they hold in hand — but Ticket to Ride: Nederland twists this gameplay in two ways. First, nearly every route on the game board is a double-route, with two tracks connecting cities. Both of these routes are in play no matter how many players are in the game.

Second, every route — whether double or single — has a bridge toll that a player must pay when building on that route. On a single route or the first track of a double route, the player pays this toll — which costs 1-4 coins — to the bank; on the second track of a double route, the player pays this toll to the player who built the first track. Players start the game with 30 coins, and if you can’t pay a toll, you must take a loan card to cover the fare, with each loan costing you 5 points at the end of the game.

In addition to helping you avoid loans, coins matter because at game’s end, players receive a bonus based on how many coins they hold relative to everyone else. In a five-player game, for example, the player with the most coins scores a 55 point bonus; the 2nd place player scores 35 points, and the other players 20, 10 and 0 points. If you’ve taken a loan, however, you’re ineligible for this bonus scoring, so players have an incentive to build early and often.

These coin bonuses are balanced by the multitude of destination tickets with large point values: six of them are worth 29+ points while another seventeen are worth 17-26 points.

Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 7 – Japan & Italy includes a double-sided game board — the longest yet in the Map Collection series — that features Japan on one side and Italy on the other.

In the Japan half of the expansion, some routes are reserved for the Bullet Train network, and once such a route is claimed, it can be used by all players to complete destination tickets. To claim such a route, discard a number of cards equal to the length of the route with all the card being the same color, then mark the route with a single Bullet Train miniature; instead of scoring points for such a route, advance your marker on the separate Bullet Train track as many spaces as the length of this route. At the end of the game, whoever has contributed the most to this shared project receives the largest bonus, with the player who contributes least being penalized.

This game board also has a small inlay for the Tokyo subway system, so players are effectively working on two networks at once. You might have a ticket that lists a city outside Tokyo and a station with Tokyo, and you need to complete a route from that other city to Tokyo, then from the central Tokyo station to that particular subway station.

In Italy, the game board is divided into regions, and players score bonus points based on how many regions they connect in their network, with three regions — Sardegna, Sicilia, and Puglia — counting as two regions in your tally. If you have separate networks, then you score each one separately.

The board also introduces a new type of ferry route. On this game board, all gray routes are ferry routes, with these routes having 1-4 spaces marked with a wave symbol. To cover a wave symbol, you must play a locomotive or a ferry card from your hand (in addition to the other cards needed to claim this route); a ferry card is a special type of card that can be drafted on its own on your turn, and it contains two wave symbols, so it can be used on its own to cover two symbols on a route.

The player trains and game cards from Ticket to Ride or Ticket to Ride: Europe are needed to play this expansion.

Days of Wonder’s Ticket to Ride Map Collection is a series of expansions for Alan R. Moon’s Ticket to Ride, with each expansion including a double-sided game board and destination tickets and rules for those locations.

Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 2 – India & Switzerland presents players with two scenarios:

• India from Ian Vincent – On this game board for 2-4 players, in addition to scoring points for claiming routes and completing tickets, a player can also score points in two other ways. First, the player with the longest continuous path of trains receives a ten point bonus. Second, each player scores bonus points for connecting the cities on one or more tickets with two distinct routes. The first two such tickets earn five additional points each, and the next three earn ten points each for a maximum bonus of 40 points.

• Switzerland from Alan R. Moon – This is a reprint of Ticket to Ride: Switzerland, first published in 2007. This game board is for 2-3 players only. Instead of connecting only cities, some destination tickets connect a city to a country or one country to any of those surrounding Switzerland; a player who completes such a ticket scores the highest point value for which they qualify. Unlike most other TtR games, discarded tickets are removed from the game instead of being returned to the ticket deck. Also, Locomotives can be used only to build tunnels.