Ticket to Ride

Following a recommendation by Gaming Steve I ordered the PC game version of Ticket to Ride from Days of Wonder. They have a well organized online shop, both for the USA and for Europe, and a few days later I had the game in my mail. Ticket to Ride is originally a board game, but has a lot of success now (relatively speaking) both as online version and single-player PC game. The PC game box contains a code for 1 year of online play as well, and all that for $30 (or € 25).

My idea was to install the game on my laptop, for having something to play while traveling. I do have WoW installed on the laptop, but learned that you don't always have internet access, thus an offline game was needed. I like PC versions of board games, because I used to play board games a lot before the online game age, and because they are one of the few types of games which have remained turn-based. I prefer turn-based games in general, and of course on a laptop while traveling a turn-based game is more practical than something which you can't leave alone for a minute.

I managed to install Ticket to Ride on my laptop, although I noticed two negative points here: The tutorials didn't play when called up from the game menu (I was able to watch them by opening the Flash player exe on the CD), and the game only runs when the CD is in the drive. That is bad for a traveling game, because the drive uses far too much battery power, and also because it forces you to lug the CD around with you.

The game is easy enough to learn, and the computer isn't playing too badly. You play on one of three possible maps, trying to claim connections between cities and building up a big railroad network. You get points for each connection, for connecting specific cities on your "tickets", and for having the longest continuous railroad at the end of the game. To build a railroad between two cities, you need to discard a number of train cards of the same color. Connections are between 1 and 6 spaces long, with the longest connections obviously giving the most points. There are 8 different train card colors, plus a joker locomotive card. Some connections are grey and can be filled with any color, others need cards of a specific color.

What makes the game interesting is the strategy involved. There are always 5 train cards open, and on every turn you can draw two cards. But each draw can be either an open card, where you know what color you get, or a face down card, giving you a chance for a color not currently face up, or even a chance to draw a locomotive joker. Taking a locomotive face up is also possible, but costs you 2 draws. And you can *either* draw, or claim a connection. So you are frantically trying to get cards of the colors you need together, while at the same time trying to build your lines faster than the competition. The "tickets", each showing two cities of varying distance, can also be a good way to earn additional points. I won my first game by having fulfilled my two starting tickets, while one computer player, who had originally more points than me, lost due to the negative points of his unfulfilled tickets.

It seems the computer players all have different strategies. And while a computer player is never an as interesting opponent as a real player, at least the single-player game is very fast. I rarely get around to play real board games any more, it takes too much time to get the players together, explain the rules, and then set up all the board, cards, and counters. So PC versions of board games are nice. I also have the PC versions of Risk, Civilization (that is *not* the Sid Meier game), and History of the World. I shied away from the latest edition of Diplomacy, because I had read it was rather badly done.

Are there any PC board games you can recommend? It seems many of them are from smaller publishers, and easily go unnoticed. My favorite board game 20 years ago was Titan from Avalon Hill, and I would love to have that for the PC, but the only version I know of is some Java-based game named Colossus.