Ticket to Ride

Lining up Europe (gettit?)

Type: Strategy
Players: 1 to 4

Time to explain to others: Under a minute

Time to play: About an hour

Difficulty: To play 1/10, Game difficulty 4/10
Portability: Board, cards and hundreds of pieces. Low.

Overall: 10/10

Ticket to Ride is a spiritual son (or daughter) of Catan. Simple to the point of idiocy but with layers upon layers of strategy. Here is a game with the (unofficial) tagline of: It takes longer to set up the board (2 minutes) than it takes to explain the rules. And it is true.

You play railroad magnates, building trainlines across the globe (about 10 maps are available, US, Europe, India, Africa, etc). You get cards, the cards have colours, combination coloured cards (5 blue, 6 pink, etc) allow you to build segments of railroad between major cities. You get 'ticket' cards that will tell you what lines you need to build, and in a nod to Catan, you get extra points for the longest line.

That's it. 

That's the game.

And herein lies the fun. If you need to build through a town an opponent is also building through, you might scupper his/her plans. The line you had the cards for in now taken by a rival company. Your London to Brighton line now goes through Edinburgh. Lovely. It plays fast and sometimes dirty. And you are at the very mercy of the cards.

Rui's conclusion: A great party game, perhaps the greatest for the non-initiated into board games. Fun, engaging and fast. A must in all BG cabinets!