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January 20, 2005
Eric Hautemont of Days of Wonder swung through town yesterday, giving me a chance to play a prototype of their upcoming Ticket to Ride: Europe. I liked what I saw. While the original game will be more appealing to families and casual players, the Europe map offers tenser, more strategic gameplay. The single biggest improvement is in the structure of the map itself, which offers very few long routes. This puts more focus on the tickets and route planning, rather than the unsatisfying but often successful "grab as many 6-routes as possible" approach. The tickets are also distributed differently: everyone gets 1 long and 3 short tickets at the start of the game (from which 2-4 are kept), and the rest of the deck contains only short tickets. This makes drawing tickets less of a gamble and therefore more viable. Players can now play stations on cities to let them share an opponent's route leading out of that city, but doing so costs you four points, 1-3 cards, and an entire turn. It's an option of last resort, but it's great to have the safety net to fall back on. Some routes require a wild card, so people will be taking them from the display more often. The least successful new element are tunnels. When claiming a tunnel, three cards are flipped up from the top of the deck. For each one that matches the color used to claim the route (wilds always match), the claiming player must pay an addition card of that type. If they can't or won't pay, they don't get the route. They take back the cards they used, but their turn ends. This random element seems out of place in this version of the game, but would be more welcome in the standard game for some of those long routes in the north and south. Ticket to Ride: Europe will use full-size cards instead of the original half-size ones. I suppose people think these are easier to shuffle, but I like the smaller cards which take up less table space. Alan Moon is the Microsoft of game designers. His first versions of products sometimes have problems, but he's very good at working them out over time and evolving them into better incarnations. After one play, Ticket to Ride: Europe appears to address the problems I had with the original game, and I'm now eager to get a copy so I can get it back on the table. Posted by Peter at January 20, 2005 02:04 PMComments
A couple of comments. The tunnels in Ticket to Ride Europe feel rather thematic to me. Tunneling is risky business and the random element represents that risk in the game. Maybe your tunneling efforts hit a particularly rough patch or were beset by a cave in. Regardless, it feels right. Second, having played a ridiculous amount of the original face to face and online, I would tend to disagree with the idea that you could successfully nab a bunch of long routes to go for the win. In my experience this is tough do do successfully. I can't speak for Alan, but I don't think that this potential strategy is the impetus for the change in the on board routes and tickets. Finally, while Ticket to Ride Europe may be a better incarnation for some (I do think it might appeal to the game mindset a bit more), I don't feel that the original product has any problems. I might not be to one's taste, but that is a horse of another color. I have to agree with Craig here! I can't see any trouble with the first incarnation of Ticket to Ride. It is so much fun and I have played it like a zillion times. And still: it's fresh, it's new and it's always different. Of course, I am biased - I am an addict :-)) I really like your comments and thoughts on the new Ticket to Ride Europe! I am very much looking forward to this and you gave some great hints on the game mechanics and changes. Thanks for posting! Posted by: Naturelich on February 11, 2005 12:22 PMPost a comment
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