Ah Board Games. I love them, but alas there’s no AI for when I’m all by myself, which sadly is most of my social life! Thank goodness then that some of them are getting the PC treatment.
Ticket to Ride is all about claiming your territories on a train map that looks like spaghetti junction. Lots of places are linked together with either grey or coloured dashes. Each dash can be filled with a train. You score points by laying trains down between two destinations so long as you have the right amount of trains needed. Grey lines can be used by any colour as long as it’s the same colour throughout and you have locomotives that can count as any colour as a nice wildcard. The longer the train line, the more points.
However you also can choose destination cards to try to make a continuous train of trains between thus mapping the journey. These are worth lots of extra points but if you fail them they will easily ruin your game.
And so the game goes round from its 2-5 players. Either choose to lay down trains, pick 2 cards from the selection available on show or from the pot luck “blind” pile, or thirdly you can choose to add a new destination card to your mix. Soon everyone’s climbing over each other trying to secure their routes and you have an immediate strategy element of simply do you lay down your trains now or do you wait for bigger, better but more riskier options later.
For the PC conversion, there’s a couple of video tutorials to help you get going and the DLC maps of Europe and Switzerland are fun with their adding of tunnels and ferries. The layout of the board and cards makes perfect sense and the game is very stable to run. The AI aren’t massively stupid nor clever either so they pose a good starting point but I’ve yet to play online with anyone yet to test this function out. However the fact its included is fantastic and should provide mass longevity.
Positive
~Light strategy and easy to learn yet hard to master
~Board game taken online!
~Good family fun
Negatives
~Has a strangely patronising voice
~DLC maps should have been included in the main package
Conclusion
A competent and more than functional rendition of a classic board game and with online features should really be part of everyone’s PC collection if they like a little of bit of PG-rated strategy.