Board Gaming - Ticket to Ride: Europe

ratticus (58)in #gaming • 7 years ago

Ticket to Ride: Europe

Back in 2004 a new game came out that provided a new use of set collection in a fun manner. This is the follow up game to that one just a year later, and I think it's a much improved game even though the original is quite good already.

At the start of the game each player is dealt 4 route cards, and have to keep at least 2 of them. A change from the original game is that there are only 6 long routes, all worth ~20 points, and everyone is dealt one at the start (as part of their 4 route cards). You can never randomly pick one up later in the game, unlike the original game where you could luck upon a cross country route. You don't have to keep the long route, as the other 3 options may work well together and not with it, but it's the only chance you get.

You then take turns either drawing coloured wagon cards (or wild engines), placing a segment of track, or taking new route cards until the game ends, which happens when someone has less than 3 carriages left in their supply.

The main part of the game is placing your carriages, which require an appropriate set of cards, both in number and colour. To play a segment, you play the appropriate number of cards of a matching colour, so if there is a 3 space segment in Green, you would need to play 3 green cards to claim it. If it was grey, it can be any single colour of your choice. Along with this the Europe map added 2 new concepts to the building of track.

Ferry segments - These sections of track are indicated by an engine picture in one or more of the spaces, and require a wild (engine) card to be part of the set played to claim it.

Tunnel segments - Indicated by a bold outline around the spaces, tunnels require the top three cards of the draw deck to be turned over, and any cards matching the colour would increase the amount needed to claim it. So for a 2 space tunnel, it could cost anywhere from 2 to 5 cards as an indication of how variably difficult it could be to construct a tunnel through the mountains.

Ticket to Ride Europe end game.jpg
^{A view of the board just before scoring happens. Little difficult to see the stations properly though}

With limited spaces, and multiple players competing for locations, it can be quite easy to get shut out of a path you need, so another addition from the original game is Stations, which are placed on a city and allow the owner to use 1 opponents route out of the city as if it were their own. I tend to avoid using them if at all possible, but using 1 to complete a ticket (route) is always better than not completing the ticket, since incomplete tickets are worth minus their value.

In our game, Black managed to make a single long rail line with a loop at one end, even though Green and Black were constantly following each other across the continent. Red and Yellow were fighting each other in a much tougher terrain, which turned out to be not so good for either of them, but they did manage to complete their routes. Blue however ended up getting too fragmented having to go around too much and ended up a little short of finishing her last couple of tickets. The 4 long tunnel from Roma to Marseilles would have made a huge difference but the right colours just weren't turning up for her.

In the end, all of the players I was teaching enjoyed the game, and all expressed interest in playing it again. It has the wonderful benefits of good theme and simple concepts coupled with good design making for a very nice game that generally plays in under an hour.