Overview
This guide for Alan R. Moon and Days of Wonder’s hit strategy boardgame will teach you everything you need to know on how to become a True Rail Baron! Becoming the best train-wielding tycoon isn’t easy, but thankfully, learning how to is simple.So what are you waiting for? Buy a ticket, a Ticket to Ride.
Introduction to Ticket to Ride
Hello, and welcome to the first Steam guide to the wonderful Ticket to Ride.
First and foremost, it should be explained just what Ticket to Ride is!
Ticket to Ride is the 2004 Spiel des Jahres award winning boardgame from Days of Wonder, created by legendary boardgame designer, Alan R. Moon.
The Spiel des Jahres is, for those who don’t know, essentially the Academy Awards for boardgames. It’s a big deal. It’s like being given ‘Boardgame of the Year’. (Although, it won many of those awards too!)
Ticket to Ride is a turn by turn strategy game, using trains to make routes stretching across America, Europe, Switzerland or Asia.
The game is played by 2-5 people, each competing to be the best Rail Baron by the end of the game, by playing trains, finishing tickets and getting points!
If you are familiar with the rules already, please, continue to section 3 of this guide.
If you are not yet familiar with how to play, there is a beginner’s tutorial in section 2.
I urge you all when playing Ticket to Ride,
Have fun and play hard!
Cazaron.
Getting Started: The Rules
Ticket to Ride is a game of strategy and chance, in which players take turns playing train cards in order to place carriages on the map, in order to complete set routes.
Doing these things will score points, and at the end of the game, the player with the most points will be declared the winner.
For those of you who are ‘TL; DR’ people, here’s a breakdown:
Do one of these each turn:
1. Pick up cards
2. Play trains
3. Pick up tickets
Now, for the rest of you, here’s how Ticket to Ride works:
Playing Ticket to Ride is broken down into a few key aspects, each of which must be understood in order to play the game effectively.
1. Train Carriages.
Initially, a player has 45 train carriages (henceforth, ‘trains’), of which they may use to ‘claim’ routes on the map.
Things to note with trains are:
– You may NOT use more than 45 trains, once you’ve used them, they’re gone.
– Once any player is down to 2 or less trains, it signals the ‘Last Turn’ phase of the game.
– Trains may only be placed when a player uses the correct number and colour of Cards to claim the route.
– A ‘Four space route’ (henceforth, ‘four route’ or sometimes simply ‘four’) such as Miami-Charleston on the map above requires the player to hand in four cards of the one colour (in this specific case, they must be four pink cards) in order to play four trains on that route.
2. Destination Tickets.
Destination Tickets, or simply, ‘Tickets’, are dealt at the start of the game to players. Initially, 3 cards are dealt, of which you must take at least two.
You must then use your trains to claim routes connecting the two cities shown on your tickets.
Things to note with tickets are:
– Any completed tickets will count for your score at the end of a game.
– Any unfinished tickets will count against your score.
– You do not have to finish your current tickets in order to pick up more.
3. Train Cards.
Train Cards, or ‘Cards’ are present as a ‘currency’ system. Initially, you are dealt four cards. In order to place your trains on the board, you must trade in cards based on the route you wish to claim.
Things to note with cards are:
– To claim a route, you must play the same number of cards as there are on the route you wish to claim.
– Cards must be traded in in groups of the same colour. To claim a 6 train grey route (Winnipeg-Sault St. Marie, for instance), you must trade in six cards of the same colour.
– ‘Wild’ Cards or ‘Locomotives’, as they are called, count as ONE of any colour card you want.
– If three Locomotives are face up on the table at any one time, they are placed on the bottom of the deck, along with the other two cards that are face up, and a new set of five is dealt to the table.
4. Routes.
Routes are claimed through the trading in of cards and the expense of trains.
Routes score differently based on how many trains were used to claim the route.
The scoring table is below:
As you can see, longer routes score more points.
5. Turns.
A single turn consists of a player performing ONE (and ONLY one) of the following actions:
1. Drawing Cards
A player may draw:
– TWO face up non wild cards OR
– ONE face up wild card OR
– ONE face up non wild card AND ONE ‘Blind Draw’ card OR
– TWO ‘Blind Draw’ cards.
2. Drawing Tickets
A player drawing tickets must take the top three tickets in the pile.
Once a player has drawn three tickets, they must decide how many they wish to keep.
They MUST keep at least one.
3. Playing Trains
A player, if they are able to trade in the right number and colour of cards, may play trains on the desired route.
Once any of these actions has been completed, play moves to the next player.
Ticket to Ride is a ‘Five minutes to learn, Ten minutes to understand, but a lifetime of playing’ game.
For strategies on understanding the game better, please go on to section three.
Getting to know the tickets
The best way to becoming a better player is to know all the tickets that the game possesses.
This sounds difficult, but it turns out, after a few games, you’ll be right on top of it.
This is the board for the USA map.
There are thirty tickets.
These are: (Courtesy of http://jkstam.tumblr.com)
Los Angeles to New York (21)
Duluth to Houston (8)
Sault St. Marie to Nashville (8)
New York to Atlanta (6)
Portland to Nashville (17)
Vancouver to Montréal (20)
Duluth to El Paso (10)
Toronto to Miami (10)
Portland to Phoenix (11)
Dallas to New York City (11)
Calgary to Salt Lake City (7)
Calgary to Phoenix (13)
Los Angeles to Miami (20)
Winnipeg to Little Rock (11)
San Francisco to Atlanta (17)
Kansas City to Houston (5)
Los Angeles to Chicago (16)
Denver to Pittsburgh (11)
Chicago to Santa Fe (9)
Vancouver to Santa Fe (13)
Boston to Miami (12)
Chicago to New Orleans (7)
Montreal to Atlanta (9)
Seattle to New York (22)
Denver to El Paso (4)
Helena to Los Angeles (8)
Winnipeg to Houston (12)
Montreal to New Orleans (13)
Sault St. Marie to Oklahoma City (9)
Seattle to Los Angeles (9)
In the 1910 expansion, some standard tickets have been modified in value (Thanks to The Raven):
Los Angeles -> Miami: Reduced from 20 to 19
Los Angeles -> New York: Reduced from 21 to 20
Sault St. Marie ->Oklahoma City: Reduced from 9 to 8
Seattle -> New York: Reduced from 22 to 20
Knowing which tickets to select is vital in any game.
Say, for instance, you drew Seattle-New York, Los Angeles-New York and Los Angeles-Chicago.
Knowing the synergy of LA-NY and La-Chi dictates that you have to at least take those two, as you can finish Los Angeles-Chicago simply by completing Los Angeles-New York, if you go via Chicago.
However, the question remains, do you take Seattle-New York as well? Being the highest scoring ticket in the game, it’s so tempting to take it.
In this case, you should, as all you would have to do to complete it is connect Seattle to your Los Angeles-New York train route.
So that’s all well and good, you know to look out for tickets that complement each other at first. But playing your trains to complement other tickets?
Here’s what I mean.
Traditionally, completing Los Angeles-New York opens up the following tickets that if you draw, can be easily completed:
Los Angeles-Chicago.
Denver-Pittsburgh.
San Francisco-Atlanta (is slightly harder, but very doable)
Portland-Nashville (is harder, but also very doable)
Seattle-New York (requires going to Seattle, but you will want to)
Seattle-Los Angeles
Finishing Seattle-New York allows easy completion of Vancouver-Montreal.
Suddenly, you have a lot of tickets, and a lot of points.
Memorise the tickets, so you can know where to best play your trains.
This is probably the most important thing. Don’t play routes you don’t need, with the only exception of ‘by playing this route, I would finish this ticket if I drew it’.
However, the one thing that should be duly noted is that you should only attempt to play routes you don’t need for the tickets you currently have if you have the trains to spare.
By this, I don’t mean that you can finish your routes. I mean that you can finish your routes in an alternate, longer way, in the event that someone blocks you.
The highest score possible in USA is 295 (courtesy of BoardGameGeek Forums)
[link]
For advanced strategies, go to section 4.
For a breakdown of each individual map, go to sections 5-8.
Tactics and Strategies
Ticket to Ride is a very simple, very complex game.
The tactics, therefore, range from the obvious to the devious, from the aggravating to the feinting.
Let’s break down the tactics some more:
Tactic #1. Mixing up the way you take a route.
Known between my friends and I as the ‘head scratcher’ move, this involves taking a route that heads in a slightly alternate way to the ticket you’re working on to ‘throw people off the scent’ of you having the ticket.
If people know what routes you have, there are a number of options they can take.
1) Work out the quickest and easiest way to bypass your routes to complete their own.
2) Block
3) See what won’t be played, and where they could lay alternate trains to get other tickets later.
If a player who is very comfortable with the tickets is playing against you, they will often know the best way to combat your tickets if you give the game away too early.
Tactic #2. Blocking your opponents.
This is sure to raise some fury, how dare you promote blocking, blocking is like murder and all that other stuff anti-blockers say, but here’s the thing:
Ticket to Ride is a game. It is a game of strategy, where at the end of the day, the most points win.
Blocking is a HUGE risk, for a number of reasons.
First and foremost, you’re going to make yourself unpopular. Unless you’re playing with a group of friends or really nice people (of whom there are plenty in the Ticket to Ride community), you block someone, they’re not going to like it.
Secondly, you’re using trains and turns, two of which are vital for your own game.
Thirdly, Blockers tend to score less, but get their victories off making other players score even less still. If someone has a chance to score a lot of points, blocking them sometimes isn’t enough, and could just end up wasting time and trains.
Blocking is a very viable and good strategy, but you need to be careful. If you block someone, you need to weigh up what route you’re blocking, how many trains it costs, how many turns or trains it will cost the other player, and whether all that at the end of the thought process is worth it.
If a game SPECIFICALLY states ‘no block’, do not block.
However, a little Ticket to Ride ettiquette for you, if a game doesn’t say no block, sometimes they say ‘fair’. Inquire beforehand about whether that means no blocking.
If you’re in a game that doesn’t say no block, and someone blocks you, sure, get a little mad, after all, you’re losing points and maybe the game, but it’s part of the strategy, and ultimately, part of the fun.
Tactic #3. Taking something you ABSOLUTELY don’t need… now.
Friends of mine know this tactic well.
Common first moves include:
New York-Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh-Chicago
Nashville-Atlanta
Seattle-Portland
Vancouver-Seattle
Taking one of these first, need it or not can be a very effective way to slow other players down, or if you’re lucky, get some long tickets later on.
Is it a waste of trains?
Potentially.
Is it a waste of cards?
Potentially.
Is it a waste of a turn?
Potentially.
If you have Winnipeg-Houston and Duluth-Houston, chances are, your first move isn’t going to be the ones mentioned above. However, if you have San Francisco-Atlanta, maybe it could be a good idea to take New York early. Who knows, it could turn into a New York-Los Angeles!
Tactic #4. Abandoning Tickets
Big risks here, but some people get into the false mindset that once you have a ticket, you have to finish it before taking new tickets. Wrong!
You can take tickets at any time, and sometimes, it’s better to take the loss of points and work on a new ticket instead.
The key risk to note here is Ticket to Ride is a game of chance. The tickets you want may not come out, and this could put you even further behind. However, often, the turns you waste trying to finish a ticket you should just abandon can leave you as a lost cause.
If you’re going to just call it quits on a ticket, the main requirement is that you do it early rather than late. The longer you leave it, the less time you have to catch up the points you’ll lose from the ticket, and the harder it becomes to finish the new tickets you pick up.
You should always weigh up whether you can finish the ticket before deciding to abandon it, but sometimes, the train and time outlay just isn’t worth it and it’s better to take new ones instead. Obviously, this is a risk, and there’s no ‘set time’ you should be doing this, but always consider it as an option. My recommendation is to prioritise finishing very long tickets instead of abandoning them but sometimes it’s wisest to just abandon those also.
USA, USA 1910: How to get the best out of the United States
Know the tickets.
I cannot stress this enough. The more you know, the better you’ll be. You won’t always win, but you’ll be a far better player.
The key cities you want in USA are these.
New York
Seattle
Miami
Vancouver
Los Angeles
Chicago
San Francisco
Atlanta
Nashville
Portland
Every single long ticket goes through these cities. Clearly, you won’t have them all, so equally as clearly, not all are needed.
Types of Game:
As the ticket selection is random, you will, each game, have to decide how to play ‘on the fly’ as it were. However, from my experience, Ticket to Ride USA comes down to a few key kinds of game.
Game type 1: The Cross Country Express
Typically, the best one. Cross map, big points, long routes. Very critical you take the small routes you need as soon as you can, and make sure you always have an alternate way in. If 40 points hinges on one single route, you should have already taken it a long time ago.
Game type 2: The Central Station
This game involves so many small tickets, in the centre of the map, including vertical routes such as Duluth-Houston. Your aim here is to be a menace to anyone playing long routes across map and beat them with the sheer number of tickets you can amass playing this style.
Things to note with this style is that you need to control choke points. New Orleans-Houston, Kansas City-Saint Louis and Omaha-Kansas City tend to be good places to work on.
Game type 3: West Coast Shuttle
Seattle-Los Angeles, Vancouver-Santa Fe, any ticket with Phoenix. There are quite a few mid-high value tickets here, but the routes are long and competition is fierce for these cities. The main issue with drafting this game early is that you’re very ‘right ticket reliant’, meaning you become more and more at risk of pulling tickets you can’t finish. It can be high scoring, but usually requires some heavy luck.
Game type 4: The Skeleton
Affectionately named by the people I play with, The Skeleton is called such due to the way it forms a ‘Skeleton’ of America. Vancouver to New York, then going through Chicago, meeting a route from Miami at Saint Louis, continuing across the centre to Salt Lake City, goes down to Los Angeles and up through Portland to Vancouver. This collects almost every long ticket in the game, but is a seriously difficult thing to pull off perfectly, as usually, the routes you want, everyone else does too.
The Skeleton is lacking on points it gets from routes, and as such, scores the bulk of its points through Tickets.
Game type 5: Border Runner Railway
The premise is simple: Trace out the southern and eastern border.
Tickets you want for this idea are Miami-Los Angeles, New York-Los Angeles, Boston-Miami, Toronto-Miami and a few others, strictly depending on how you play the borders.
Choke point to be mentioned here: New Orleans-Houston. Take it and take it early if you are playing the Border Runner. Take it early if you notice someone needs Miami and is going via Los Angeles.
Obviously, in any game, you will not strictly adhere to any one kind of Game type, but if you can recognise what style you’re playing, you can play it better, or if you recognise what style someone else is playing, you can know which tickets they have and how best to stop them.
Europe: How to win in the Turn of the Century Europe
Winning in Europe comes down to the same formula it did in USA. Know the tickets.
Amazing, isn’t it? The one strategy can help so immensely.
If you want to be good in Europe, be good in the USA. The same tactics follow through.
New things to remember in Ticket to Ride Europe:
Tunnels:
Singlehandedly the best and worst thing ever to be introduced to Ticket to Ride.
A tunnel route (denoted by the different markings on the board to a Regular route) requires that when you play that route, three cards come up from the pile. If any of those match the colour you are trying to play (or are locomotives), you must play one extra card of that colour to be able to claim the route. If you can’t pay the extra cards, you can’t take the route and must try again next turn.
Stations:
Blocking got considerably harder with the addition of stations.
A station allows you to ‘borrow’ another player’s route from the city it is on to one city it is connected to. The station may only borrow ONE route out of or into a city, and while you don’t have to say which specific route this is, when scoring, you may not vary which direction it goes.
For instance: Assume that you, the green player, have the ticket Stockholm-Cadiz. You have the routes Stockholm-Kobenhavn, Essen-Frankfurt, but the cheeky Red player has Kobehavn-Essen! In the US version, this would be a block, and it would be very hard to come back from. In Europe, however, you may place a station. If you place the station on Kobenhavn, it can ONLY use the Kobenhavn-Essen route; as you own the other route it could theoretically use. If you placed the station on Essen instead, it could use ONE of the following: Kobenhavn-Essen, Essen-Berlin, Essen-Frankfurt (which you already have) or Amsterdam-Essen. As you need Kobenhavn, if you were to put a station on Essen, you would use the Kobenhavn-Essen route. If, later in the game, you needed the route Essen-Amsterdam, but the cheeky Yellow player this time had that route, you could not use your Essen station to borrow that route if you still intended on using it for Stockholm-Cadiz. You would instead need to put a station on Amsterdam.
In summary, then: You do not have to say which route you are ‘borrowing’, but you cannot use the same station to ‘borrow’ multiple routes. To do this, you must use different stations.
To claim or use a station, you must pay one card of any one colour for your first, two cards of the same colour for your second and three cards of the same colour for your third station. Drag the card the same way you would claim a route, but have the crosshair over the city you wish to claim. The game will then verify that you wished to place a station.
For every station you do not use at the end of the game, you get 4 points, leading to a 12 point bonus for not using any stations.
The limit for stations is that only one can be used per city. If your opponent beats you to it, you can’t play one on that city. However, you can usually play the station on the other connection and borrow the route in reverse.
—
The majority of tickets are focused in the busiest areas, that being Britain, France, Switzerland through to Spain. These are all short routes and short tickets, meaning to finish them, you need to get in fast. Slightly longer tickets are across map or North-South on the opposite side of the board, near to or in Russia.
Each game draws you one long ticket as well as three short tickets.
From experience, the only reason to not take the long ticket is if you have three very synergised short tickets and the long ticket does not fit at all.
There is always a temptation to take the 8-route tunnel due to the high pointscore it delivers. Traditionally, it doesn’t help you that much, unless you have set tickets, it’s very out of the way and not helpful.
That said, if you have 8 trains left, a few cards to spare and you don’t want to risk taking more tickets, do it. It’s the best way to end the game, opponents can be so frustrated by the immediate pointscoring and last turn phase.
Also, I’m voting Europe for the best elevator music in the world. Please, elevators, take this. It’s fantastic.
Switzerland: Exploring the Verdant Valleys and Mountain Passes!
Upon selecting this map, you hear Escherbot exclaim ‘Explore the Verdant Valleys and Mountain Passes of Switzerland!’ He’s happy, he’s excited, and that’s what Ticket to Ride Switzerland is. Fun.
It’s a 2-3 player variant of Ticket to Ride. It’s intense, it’s close, it’s competitive and most of all, it’s Alan R. Moon’s favourite version. That tells you a lot.
To cite an interview he had:
“Moon’s favorite versions are Switzerland and Nordic Countries. “Both of these maps are only for two or three players,” he said. “And while the bigger games can often be tense, the smaller games are always tense right from the start because there are less routes and some of the routes are so key.””
Some noticeable differences from Europe and the USA:
Tunnels:
Are present in Switzerland, the same way as they were in Europe
Tunnel cards:
Locomotives look different in this version, because they are. Locomotives in Switzerland do not work like locomotives in USA or Europe. You can only use a locomotive on a tunnel route, and as such, locomotives in this version are called Tunnel Cards. On a tunnel route, however, these do work exactly the same as they would in Europe. You can take 2 locomotives instead of one due to the restriction that they cannot be played on non-tunnel routes.
Double Routes:
Three player game, double routes are OPEN! How awesome is that?
Country-Country and City-Country Tickets:
These tickets, newly introduced present you with a choice. They provide to you a starting city or country and then the number of points you would get, connecting that to one of the countries. You only get the highest number of points you connect. By this, if you were to connect Austria, France, Germany and Italy, upon getting a country-country ticket, you would only get ONE of the scores, not all three.
The Ticket stack:
Every time you take tickets, the ticket(s) you don’t take are discarded. The ticket stack will be emptied before the end of many games. As such, you do need to consider taking tickets (and hoarding tickets) early.
How to play Switzerland properly:
There are no ‘correct’ ways to play each map. However, there are things that help. On the Switzerland map, you will notice a Central column from Germany down to Italy. This is key. Many of the tickets will use this column, and you want to be one of the players taking it.
Connecting countries and using them to farm the country-country and city-country tickets is often a very good and high scoring way to go.
Helpful hint: Country routes are dead ends. A route into a country does not connect with any other route into/out of the same country.
Don’t be afraid to throw down trains branching everywhere in Switzerland.
Don’t be afraid to completely ignore an unfinished ticket in Switzerland. Some of them are only worth two points, so if you don’t think you need to finish it, don’t, you can take more tickets instead.
Legendary Asia: Venturing into Forbidden Lands
Legendary Asia. The latest addition to the Ticket to Ride online family.
It’s a change of pace, let me assure you.
It’s my least played, but by no means my least favourite.
What Asia provides is a much more thought intensive game. Double routes are blocked for 3 players down.
What’s new in Asia:
Mountain Routes
Mountain routes are denoted by an X on the route. Not tunnels this time, but they operate in a very interesting way.
Instead of making you pay extra cards to use a route, mountain routes make you pay extra TRAINS.
One extra train per mountain route. You may be thinking, ‘This is outrageous, I’m losing trains here!’. Well, you are, but their efforts are not in vain. You gain two points per train you lose, so these routes do turn out to be very effective in racking up points quickly.
The way to play Asia is, as always, learn the tickets, and then understand the core elements of Europe. There are busy and calmer areas on the map. The busiest area is in the centre of the map, where the routes are shorter. The second busiest is the northwest. Use this knowledge to your advantage, take what you need in those two areas quickly. There are a few choke points to note, these being Hanoi-Macau, Calcutta-Mandalay, Tbilisi-Astrakhan and Shiraz-Karachi. There are several other points that can be used as choke points, but are less commonly used that way, such as Baghdad-Tehran and Xi’an-Peking.
Generally, consider the long route in your initial tickets. It will be your main source of points in the endgame.
Tickets tend to come in medium scores, meaning each one is valuable. You tend to not be able to afford to just drop 10 points in Legendary Asia, and thus, the risk should be considered far more heavily.
Multiplayer: Training Hard to Out-Train your Opponents!
Multiplayer: the crown jewel in the game of Ticket to Ride.
Ticket to Ride’s multiplayer is accessed from the main menu by going to the station (‘More’ on the main menu) and clicking the restaurant (‘Online Games’ in the station)
Once there, you’re confronted with the lobby, which can be an interesting thing to come to terms with.
Effectively, there are two main screens, what I like to call the ‘View’ tab and the ‘Create’ tab.
Firstly, the View tab:
What the view tab is used for is to see the games that other people have made, in order for you to join and compete against them. The actual tab name is ‘Join’, but I prefer view as you can see what games are there, whether or not you can join them.
I’ll run through in order what each of the sections are before outlining some multiplayer ettiquette.
1. The game name. This will do one of three things: Say who owns the game, what map it is or the house rules the game owner wishes to play by.
2. The map. If you don’t yet understand or can’t infer from context which map is which, the map choices are USA, 1910, Europe, Switzerland and Asia.
3. Players: Black figurines show how many are waiting in the game already. Grey figures show how many the game needs to start and White figures show the maximum number of players allowed.
4. The ‘!’ section: Shows two things, a Lock and a Trophy. The Lock, if closed, means a game is password protected (and you’ll only be able to play if you have the password). The trophy shows that a game is ranked, which means the outcome will count towards your online rank.
5. The Tabs: The three tabs, Join, Create and Observe allow you to navigate between the sections of the lobby that you require. If you need to create a game, click the Create tab and so on.
6. Search: You can search for players by name, if online, so you can add, block or message them.
7. Your profile information: This part includes your profile, including games played, score, karma*, time zone, language and online rank. Will display another user’s information if they are selected.
8. Chat: Users waiting in the lobby can discuss things in this section. Messages will be displayed here.
Secondly, the Create tab:
The Create tab is used to set up a game of Ticket to Ride for your friends or for online opponents.
In order, the sections numbered are:
1. The game name. This is the part where you name your game, will be seen as this in the Join/View tab. Name it either after yourself, the map or the rules you wish to play (see later)
2. Public/Private slider: Probably the most important part of the creation is this tool. When unlocked (as per image), the game is open to any who wish to join. When locked, you set a password (underneath where ‘Game name’ is) that allows users to join only when they have the password. Use this to set up games for your friends. Make sure to tell them the password before you start.
3. Ranked: When lit orange, the game you set up will count towards your online ranking. If you don’t want your games to count (for instance, you’re just playing for fun against a friend, non seriously), make sure to uncheck this icon.
4. The map: Use the arrows to select which map to play on. If you don’t have the required DLC, you will not be able to play some maps.
5. The game settings: Use the ‘Min’ and ‘Max’ bubbles to change how many people can play the game. ‘Min’ will not allow the game to start until that number of players are in game, ‘Max’ is what the highest number of players that can join is. The Karma setting is for if you wish to deny access to players with a certain Karma below the threshold. ‘Robots’ toggles the number of AI bots playing the game. The most you can have and still play with another human is 3.
The ‘observable by’ option changes which users can watch the game in the observe tab and the Hide Cards button is to change whether or not spectators can see the cards players have. Keep this on if you don’t have a set reason to turn it off.
Okay, Multiplayer Ettiqutte:
There are a few things that will become apparent the more games you play.
Firstly: ‘Fair’/’No Block’
These games are cryptic at first, as fair means to abide by the rules… In online Ticket to Ride, it doesn’t. What a ‘Fair’ game means is ‘No Blocking Allowed’. You are not allowed to perform an obvious blocking maneuver to stunt another player’s progress. This is not actually against the rules, and is in fact encouraged by Alan R Moon, but keep in mind that in these games, it is frowned upon.
Secondly: ‘Fast’
Some players like to take their time thinking about moves. Some don’t. In ‘Fast’ games, a ‘ten second rule’ is considered to be ‘in effect’, where you play moves quickly and know what you’re doing in order to play a game and finish it in a small amount of time.
Thirdly: ‘Min Rank’
These games are restricted to those with an online rank that exceeds the ‘cutoff’. Don’t join these games if you’re below the rank unless you’ve asked them first. These players are in one of two categories: Score chasers and High-Level-Expectations. Unless you meet their criteria, try to avoid these games.
*Karma is the sum total of your propensity to finish games. 1 point received for a finished game, 3 points lost for an abandoned game. Once karma is at the highest threshold, you will not gain any more karma for finishing games. Generally, set medium karma thresholds to stop any serial offenders of abandoning games, but still allow players into your games.
I have three hard and fast rules with Ticket to Ride:
1. Don’t join any game you want then complain when something happens.
2. In general, make your own games, because you can play how you most enjoy playing.
3. Don’t get caught into fights with other users, just block them and carry on. Leave if you have to, and send a report to Days of Wonder through their website.
Mostly though, online is about having fun and playing well in order to have the best, most competitive games of Ticket to Ride that you can.
Hope you all enjoy online, and look forward to seeing you there myself!
Final Comments
You’ve reached the final comments section of the guide, and that clearly means you’re either really excited about Ticket to Ride (in which case, Godspeed, get into the game) or you have way too much time on your hands (in which case, Godspeed, get into the game).
I do expressly thank you all for reading the guide, and I pre-emptively thank you for any feedback or advice for furthering the guide.
Special thanks do need to go out to Leeroy, who co-authored this guide with myself, and who over the course of time, has taken me on in many bitter struggles in Ticket to Ride, on PC, iOS and the board. Your time, your skill and your friendship mean a lot to me, so thank you.
Becoming a Rail Baron isn’t easy, but it is a wonderful journey, that I wish you all well on.
Good luck, thank you all for making the Ticket to Ride community a wonderful and friendly place.
Cazaron.