STEEMy boardgame #1: Ticket to ride:Europe

Hey everybody!

Today it's time for the first Review of my new series: STEEMy boardgames. As a first game I choose to Review "Ticket to ride:Europe". Ticket to ride is a really famous game and has a lot of available extensions for different countries and worldparts. To be able to play an extension you need one of the 2 basicgames: Europe or America. I chose to buy the Europe version because I live in Europe and it has 2 extra difficulties wich the America-version dont have: Tunnels & ferries.

Travel around Europe

Use your trains to build routes between the european cities to accomplish your missions. Its not for free to build a route with your trains tough. You have to collect tickets in the right colour to be able to build a certain route on the gameboard.

The gameboard

As you can see on the board there are a lot of different colours. Each route costs the amount of tickets in the right colour to be able to put your trains there and travel from one city to another. The grey routes you see at the board means that you can use a colour of your choice but you can only use one colour for a route. At the start of the game each player only has 4 tickets in his hand. You have to collect more tickets during the game to be able to put more trains on the gameboard.

There are 8 different tickets plus a joker

Tunnels & ferries

There are also some connections on the board wich work a bit different. If a connection between 2 cities has black dots around it then it means its a tunnel. You never know how much tickets you have to pay for a tunnel because after you say you build it you have to turn 3 cards from the ticket draw pile and for every card matching the colour you are building you have to pay 1 ticket more. If you can't or don't want then your turn is over.

On some routes on the board there you see a ferry. Ferry-routes are always grey so you can use a colour of your choice but for each square with a ferry on it on that route you have to pay a jokerticket.

Missions

The main purpose of the game is to accomplish your missions by building specific trainroutes. At the beginning of the game you have 2 or 3 missions to accomplish. You get 3 missions but can return one if you think it will be hard to finish that mission. If you have unfinished missions at the end of the game they will give you minuspoints so its smart to think about your choices. The longer a route is the more points it will give you when you finish it. When you finished all your missions you can choose to take new ones to earn even more points.

Finishing a mission will give you the points at the card. If you didnt finish a mission at the end of the game it will get you the same amount as minuspoints

Gameplay

Each turn you have the choice to do one of the 3 following actions:

• Build a route on the board by paying the right amount of tickets in the right colour
• Ask for a new mission (you get 2 and can return 1 if you want)
• Take 2 tickets (or 1 if you choose a jokerticket)

Even when the missions are the maingoal of the game its not the only way of earning points. The player with the longest route gets 10 points and for each connection you also get some points based on how long it is.

The more trains, the higher the points a connection is worth

The game will end when one of the players have 2 or less trains left in his stack. After this happens each player still have one turn before its time to calculate the points and decide who won.

Summary

I really love this game because its a combination of strategy and luck. You have to get the right colour of tickets to build a route but you should also think about when to build it. Some connections on the board only allow one player to build there so if you are too late you have to take another route to still finish your mission. Also the choice to take a new mission or not can be hard because unfinished missions give you minuspoints at the end of the game and missions you get are random. If you are unlucky then its already full of trains on the route you have to build and you will end up with minuspoints.

The rules of the game are not hard to understand and there are a lot of expansions wich you can buy to play on another part of the World. I actually also bought "Ticket to ride: The Netherlands" but I didnt play that one yet. With each expansion there could also be a new set of rules wich makes it even more interesting.

I would definately advice other people to play this game because its easy to understand and a lot of fun to play!

Amount of players: 2-5
Age: 8+
Time to play: 30-60 minutes

Final score: