Ticket to Ride Legacy – Legends of the West

When it comes to re-imaginings of board games, it can be a mixed bag. Some are… questionable, to say the least (Twilight Inscription), some are a revelation (Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition) and some are… are you sure about this… oh! Who’d a thought it? I (we) am four games into Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West and I am going to keep this as spoiler-free as possible but… if you want to go into this and not know what your getting into then you are probably already into it. Did any of that make any sense at all? No? Yeah, I might spill a few beans. Barely a side serving. Or should that be ‘siding’ serving?

LET THE PUNATHON COMMENCE!

The Power Of Three

Legends of the West is a legacy version of Ticket to Ride, brought to you by the Emperor of Euros, Alan R. Moon, Unmatched Master Rob Daviau and the King of Co-ops, Matthew Leacock (Rob and Matt have already worked on Pandemic: Legacy together). Wait a minute, Ticket to Ride LEGACY? Surely the whole idea of a Legacy game is to tell a story and Ticket to Ride is not exactly what you’d describe as a ‘narrative driven game’. In fact, it’s only a map and mini away from being an abstract. But what if you didn’t get all the map… at once? And what if you made your train journeys… into actual journeys? In fact, the more you look at it, you more you ask yourself ‘why shouldn’t Ticket to Ride be a story-driven game? I mean, if it was good enough to be the title of a Beatles song…’ CAUTION: FOLLOWING CONTENT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS, BUT I WILL KEEP THEM TO A MINIMUM AND STOP SHOUTING.

Legends of the West opens with the players, as few as two or up to five of them (the more the merrier as this is an event game0, vying for control of the rail-lines on the East Coast of the United States of America in the late Nineteenth Century. This follows the mysterious demise of the head of Reeves Rails, Thaddeus Reeves, potentially at the hands of the dastardly Ma O’Connell, a competitor of Thaddeus.

The first game is very much like one of the smaller versions of TTR, like San Francisco or London, and play follows the same structure as other games in the TTR series: gain Train Cards, play Train Cards to make train lines and gain Ticket Cards to earn end game points if routes are complete. But here the similarity ends in a number of ways.

Firstly, you don’t gain victory points for putting down trains. You may receive Dollars for making tracks of your own colour, but all the points are worked out and recorded at the end of the session.

There are also Big Cities on the map that, when you build a line to or from them, you receive a Train card from the top of the deck – this means that you get a lot more flow in the game rather than the not-so-bad-but-tangible ‘clunk’ of having to draw train cards before you can put down trains – it is all down to luck on what you draw though, (luck? In a Euro?) but it can play out.

More significantly though, there are cards lurking within the train deck that can trigger events – this is where we see the hand of Mr Leacock most clearly. These ‘Newspaper’ cards, when drawn, see the players draw the top card of the event deck. These can be one-off immediate bonuses or forfeits, such as gaining or losing Dollars depending on certain players’ connections, or ongoing effects that may make things easier or harder for players – this is usually where the shadowy figure of Ma O’Connell rears her schemin’ noggin (though later in the game she plays a more active role in frustrating players, as do other, as yet, unrevealed characters. Spoilers…). These will remain in play until another ‘Newspaper’ card is revealed, which will either illicit a sigh of relief or groan of frustration.

Once the first game has been completed, scores are recorded for each player on an invoice for that year. Players receive scores based on how much actual money they have accrued, how many train minis they have left (less trains means more points) and how many Dollars they receive for completed tickets. Invoices are then posted into the Vault of each player’s box- this box will also be used to store all the other items they will gain over the course of the game. The Vault will not be opened until the end of the twelve-game campaign and the contents will be used to determine the overall winner.

Then the fun really begins.

Tickets Please! (They Certainly Do!)

Okay, this is the BIG SPOILER bit – stop here if you don’t want to know.

Okay, last chance… Good to go? Good to go.

Once you get to the end of your first game of Legends of the West, your story cards – oh yes, the story cards, I forgot about them. When you start a game, the story cards will instruct you how to set up the board for that ‘Year’ and give you instructions on what to do with event cards and the like. It will then have a big PAUSE to stop you from going too far into the narrative. Sorted? Sorted. Anyway, at the end of the first game, the story tells you to open the Conductor box – there are lots of boxes to open in Legends, one for each region of the States that you unlock, but this is the first, most important of the boxes.

Inside the Legends of the West box is a shiny hole-punch. Or to be more precise, a ticket punch, because at the end of each game, you are going to punch each of the tickets for the routes that you complete. This is possibly one of the most satisfying and thematic mechanics to be introduced into a game ever.

Tickets for routes come in two varieties. One variety has two circles for each player’s colour. When/if you complete the route, you punch one of the circles of your colour; if you punch a second circle of your colour, having completed the route a second time in another game, that route is taken out of the game (retired) and sent to the Dead Letter Office – this is where all of the retired cards will go during the campaign rather than send them to the circular filing cabinet (bin).

The other variety of ticket only has one circle of each colour, and once any of those circles is punched, it will be retired. But when it is retired, it will tell the player to retrieve a numbered Postcard. This Postcard will then give that player a bonus, which could be a different way to score in a later game, or information about another region, or even a one-time effect that can be cashed in when the time is right. Everyone in the group will know what the Postcard is about, whether it be about couriering fine wines or transporting circus animals, but only the owner of the post card will know what it really means. Mwah-hah-hah-hah…

I don’t really want to say too much about what else is revealed in the game as doing so would spoil the surprises in store, but I will say that there are nods to other classic games such as Settlers of Catan and Pandemic – you’d expect this with Matt Leacock on board, as it were, but I will be interested to see what other games get a shout out before the end of the campaign – and I CAN reveal that a dice will be rolled during one of the rounds. Also, by the end of the game, you will actually be left with a unique and still playable version of Ticket to Ride, which is not always the case with Legacy games. Good though, considering your initial outlay for this game (it is not cheap).

Off The Rails Or Fast Track To Classic?

If it isn’t clear from the preceding, I really like this TTR Legends of the West. I mean, sure, I wasn’t the one who put up the wonga for this (I have a friend who goes all in – HI CRAIG!), so I am not experiencing the buyer’s remorse here, but… I feel if I did, it would be mild.

I am very impressed at how they have managed to create a compelling narrative out of game which lacks one – I’m not complaining about a lack of narrative, not every game needs a narrative. The general quality of the components is very high, especially that tool, though in certain nods to certain games you might think ‘is that it’ – listen, it’s a tribute to ‘that’ game, how could it look like anything else?

The play also has a lovely pace to it – we usually get through a couple of games in a session, but as the map grows, game time is gradually increasing – and there is plenty of customisation opportunity in here – once the game is complete, I reckon we will all look back on the board and say ‘remember when’, and get all nostalgic, while still being able to enjoy new games with it. You could also say that this is an 18XX game too, but a lot more accessible than they appear to be – prove me wrong, 18XX fans…

I mean, I’ve been proved wrong about Legacy games. From now on, I will destroy all my games…