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Ticket to Ride! We all love it, well 8 million+ of us do. Ever since Alan R. Moon’s mastepiece won Spiel des Jahres in 2004 it’s been right up there in terms of popularity and sales for 20 years. But what if this was your introduction to the wonderful world of board gaming and you want more?
Well there are endless map variations and if you started with the original USA version you should certainly get TTR Europe, widely regarded as the best with its introduction of tunnels, ferries and stations but what of games other than TTR?
The recent ZATU feature Games for those who liked Ticket to Ride focused on games with a similar vibe in terms of ease of play, mechanics, enjoyment level etc. but none of them involved trains. So what if, for you, the railway theme was the key aspect? Well, fear not gentle reader, because we’ve got the answer!
Orient Express
Orient Express, by Carla & Jeff Horger from Rio Grande games, is probably the closest to TTR Europe as you plot rail routes across the continent to satisfy passenger demands. We have the card collecting element of TTR’s Destination Tickets in the Passenger Cards. You don’t, however, have to collect card sets to lay your rails down you can just lay 1-3 pieces of track on your turn. You can lay these anywhere you want, too, they don’t have to be connected or part of your network, though they usually are. When you have all the towns on one of your Passenger Cards connected you can claim it and you will score its’ VPs at game end.
The map is also divided into 9 Regions from Iberia to Russia, The Balkans to the British Isles. Your starting hand of 5 cards can be drawn from either the Passenger deck or any of the Regional Decks. You complete a Regional Card in the same way but you get the added bonus of taking a Nationalism Token worth 4, 2 or 1 VP.
All very fine and very familiar but now we come to Orient Express’s key difference. You start with 35 track segments and whilst they stay where they are when you claim a Passenger Card they are removed when you claim a Regional Card. This represents the Region nationalising that part of the network and taking it out of your hands whilst rewarding you with the Nationalism Token.
This provides the key dynamic in Orient Express: do you leave your network, you’ve built up over many turns, in place hoping to score more Passenger Cards before you run out of track to lay or do you claim a Regional Card and re-cycle your track as well as getting a higher level Nationalisation Token?
The turns are quick you either lay or remove track and then score and replace a card if you can. There’s no nastiness, there’s ways you can use other player’s tracks, and you can even score a bonus for building the actual Orient Express.
Mini Express
Next up is Mini Express. This great design by Mark Gerris delivers a maxi amount of content in a midi sized box. You build routes, again, to link cities but rather than deliver passengers your focus is on railways’ real reason, delivering freight. The four commodities grow in importance as more of their cities are linked and players strive to increase their Influence whilst acquiring Shares in those markets.
The two-sided board shows the US and Europe. Each side has 32 cities that are given a random Demand Tile. Demand tiles show two commodities: Wood, Steel, Leather, Cotton or a purple joker. Four different train companies each focus on one of the commodities and have 25 wooden Train tokens and 9 shares in their company colours: Brown/Wood, Grey/Steel, Orange/Leather, White/Cotton
1-5 players (with Solo rules and AI bots) are not tied to a particular freight company but have their own coloured markers to represent their levels of Influence in the 4 markets.
Each turn you do one of two things:
Build Track – linking the existing rails of any company to another city. Increasing their value on the Track Length chart with the player having their Influence increased per pictured commodity on the Demand Tile.
Take a Share – from any company. You pay for this in Influence relative to the number of trains available that can be laid and then top the number up.
This neat mechanism gives you a constant dilemma as the longer track you lay, increasing the value of your favourite company you make it cheaper for the following player to buy a share.
Game ends when 2 lots of shares run out. Companies will have different worth and the value of player’s shares will vary relative to their Influence.
This is a great game to play, quick and easy to set up (unless like me you have to get all the litlle trains lined up neatly!) and will play in the 40-60 min time stated.
Pacific Rails Inc
Pacific Rails Inc by Dean Norris from Iello games sees you blazing a trail across Western USA to complete the Transcontinental Railroad. With Worker Placement, Resource Management, Route Building and literal Engine Building you gain success via Variable Scoring methods.
Your Player Card pictures an Engine that holds a number of houses to be used as stations or to increase the number of resources gathered. Also there are Telegraph posts which score a greater number of VPs as they are placed on the board and cargo spaces for your resources and built tracks ready to be laid. Each of the, up to 4, players has 6 workers available to gather resources, build track or lay it.
Players start with 2 trains on opposite sides of the map. Tracks once laid are universal and the game ends when there is a contiguous line from one side to the other.
You lay track that you have previously built to take your engine from one city to the next. The terrain of Plains, Hills or Water must be crossed by the right track. You score points for the track you’ve laid, ala TTR, and you build a Railway Station or Telegraph Station at the end and move your Train on to it. You can use other players track but you won’t get points for it.
Your first 3 Railway Stations also give you extra carriages onto your train with more cargo space and room for Specialists. These will provide more track and money. As you place a worker on the game board to build track they also act as “foreman” on you engine and all the Specialists on your train and carriage upgrades are activated.
This is a fine game and the map section of the board is lovely with enough pieces of track with different junctions and backgrounds to create a very pleasing layout. The only drawback is the basic terrain is not variable so after repeated plays you may find you’re utilising the same old routes.
Isle of Trains
Isle of Trains continues the theme of the last game by giving players an Engine to which they can add Carriages, various Freight Cars and Cabooses. There isn’t really any route planning or track laying here but there are a lot of cards and these are triple purpose cards.
Yes these are not just cards, these are M & S cards, that’s Money and Stock, and Cargo too! The cards depict Engines, Passenger Coaches and 3 types of Freight cars all of which come in 3 levels of increasing value and utility. There are also Cabooses and Buildings which aren’t upgradeable but all have unique bonus powers. To add the rolling stock to your train you must pay for them by discarding other cards you don’t want. The cards third use is to provide cargo for your freight cars by turning them sideways and putting them under said cars. You also have Passenger Tokens that can be loaded onto your Engine or Coaches.
You score points by “delivering” your cargo or passengers to the 6 Island locations that demand them. This doesn’t involve any physical movement or routing but just having the right items loaded.
It’s not hard to see that with all the uses for the Train Cards you’re going to burn through them pretty fast. Yes, you can take 1 more card or 1 Passenger as 1 of your 2 Actions on a turn but that’s not going to be quick enough. So, here’s where the neat USP comes in. Instead of loading cargo and/or passengers on to your own train for later delivery you can load them on to an opponent’s train! Doing so will give you an instant bonus not available when loading on your own train. This is often a few more cards. The downside is that other player benefits by delivering the goods themself.
There are also a lot of interesting solo scenarios.
Union Pacific
Now this is an earlier Alan R. Moon game released in 1999 - 5 years before Ticket To Ride won the Spiel des Jahres. I won’t say too much about it as it is now out of print. Suffice to say it concentrated on you making money on the shares you owned in 10 different US railroad companies. It had a map of the US with routes linked across it, loads of cards for you to collect sets and little model trains that went on the routes which look very familiar.
Ticket to Ride: Europe 15th Anniversary Collector’s Edition
Of course, there are many variations and additions of Ticket to Ride itself and these have been covered in other ZATU blogs most notably Thom Newton’s “Which Ticket to Ride Game is for You?” but I just want to finish by making a case for the Ticket to Ride: Europe 15th Anniversary Collector’s Edition which I got recently through ZATU’s generous Father’s Day offer. It’s not only the title that’s big everything is bigger and better – a bigger map, a host of additional routes and sets of model trains in their ornamental tins to absolutely die for!
I’d recommend any of the above games: Orient Express if you want to lay rails without collecting sets, Mini Express if you want something quicker, Pacific Rails if worker placement is your thing, Isle of Trains if you’re not bothered about routes and Union Pacific if you could get hold of it but if Ticket to Ride Europe really does it for you then treat yourself to the 15th Anniversary Collector’s Edition, you’re worth it!
