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April 07, 2004

Ticket to Ride

Played this new game last night and I largely agreed with Peter's review of it in the Game Report. In our game, the initial ticket draw largely dominated the game. David got LA-Miami as a ticket which is a beautiful run if you can complete it as it uses 3 6-long routes (and 1 2) and thus scores 47 for the route placements and 20 for the ticket at a a cost of something like 14 turns (10 turns to draw the 20 cards and four to place the routes). This is a huge score per-turn (almost 5) average and once he succeeded at it he largely had the win in hand, especially since he was well on his way to longest total route as well. He even ended up just barely lapping another player.

I, OTOH, had 3 very poor tickets which had no segments at all in common and only one of them used a 6-long route. I did my best with them and completed them but not for nearly as many points (or nearly as long an overall route) as David. The Tickets are worth enough that ignoring them is really not an option but if your route is composed of nothing but short segments (as it was for one player who played almost all 2 long segments), you just can't score enough points. Playing a route composed of 2-long segments scores something like 2 points a turn overall compared to the amazing 5 David was scoring. Alternatively, you blow off your ticket and go for 6's and score 4 points a turn average but then MINUS the ticket cost so proably like 3 points a turn. This is better than the all short segments scheme but not close to the long segments with ticket plan.

I'll try this again but really think the game may be dominated by the initial ticket deal. Blocking is also pretty random and often costly to the person doing it for no certain benefit. Even if it works, it often helps against one player and hurts against the others.

Posted by aarondf at April 7, 2004 03:38 PM

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