“Ticket to Ride” (2004) by Alan R Moon with art by Cyrille Daujean and Julien Delval and many different publishers was, in many ways, probably the game that brought indie gaming to the mainstream. Its reaction was somewhat delayed; according to some friends, who include longtime indie gamers who can remember back to 2004 and owners and employees of local game stores, it wasn’t until the mid-2010’s or so that it truly broke into the mainstream. That said, this game really laid the groundwork for what the modern explosion of interest in indie gaming could become. And in addition to a general game review, I’m going to talk about a specific aspect of “Ticket to Ride” that probably helped it make that leap: accessibility.
“Ticket to Ride” is a train track-building game where you collect cards to complete routes between adjacent cities and ultimately can get you between much further cities. The initial game was set across the United States and a bit of Canada. Since then, expansions have included maps for Iberia, South Korea, Japan, Italy, Poland, France, the Old West, United Kingdom, Pennsylvania, Nederland, Africa, India, Switzerland, two versions of Asia, and Europa (all written as listed in the game). A nearly endless slew of released fan-made expansions has included most countries on Earth, as well as some states and locales, Mars, Middle Earth, Wonderland, and the galaxy. And I’m sure there are many others that haven’t even been released – I’ve made a Star Wars one and one for my home state, for instance, and I didn’t see those on lists of fan expansions. “Ticket to Ride” has the relatively unique flexibility that, to make an expansion, you pretty much only need a map of a place and some patience. The original game may have been for the United States, but the general format is location agnostic.
At the start of the game, you’re dealt five destination cards (in the base version; various expansions, such as the “Europa” expansion, change this). These might be something like “New York to Los Angeles,” “Boston to Miami,” or “Duluth to Dallas.” You must keep at least three, and it’s generally recommended you choose ones that have similar paths. “Chicago to New Orleans,” “Montreal to Dallas,” and “Nashville to New York,” for instance, are all easy to complete with somewhat overlapping routes, but “Vancouver to Duluth” or “San Francisco to Sault St. Marie” wouldn’t work well. Each destination card is worth a number of points that normally corresponds to the minimum number of track spaces needed to get between them. If you complete the destination, you get the points. Fail to reach it, and you lose them. This can cause issues in places like Boston, Vancouver, Miami, or Las Vegas, which have very limited paths in and out of them.
On your turn, you can take one of three* actions (more on the asterisk soon). The most straightforward of these is drawing new destination cards. You draw three, have to keep at least one, and discard the rest.
Next, you can “build a track”. Place down a number of colored train car cards equal to the number and color of spaces on the tracks you want to claim. For instance, Helena to Salt Lake City is a direct track that is three pink spaces, so you’d need three pink train cards (or some combination of pink and wild cards that add up to three). The colors are pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, black, and white. There are also gray tracks, which can be completed by any color, so long as the color is consistent. Toronto to Pittsburgh (a two-car long gray track) could be filled by two blue train car cards, or two reds, or any other combination of same-colored or wild cards, but not one blue and one red. Some tracks, such as Denver to Kansas City, have two options – in this case, a four-car black track and a four-car orange track. You can complete either, but you still need to be consistent which color you are building on. Additionally, in two- or three-player games, only one side of a double track can be built. Both sides can be built in a four- or five-player game. After using the cards to build a track, you discard them. You also get points for building tracks (ranging from one point for a one-car track to 15 for a six-car track).
Finally, you can draw train car cards. There are a few different options for how you do this (hence the asterisks). The simplest is that you blindly draw two cards from the face-down draw pile. You can also draw two cards from the face-up draw stacks, replacing them after each draw. However, if a locomotive (or wild) card is in the face-up draw stacks, you can only draw that card on your turn. So, I could draw a green card from the draw stacks, replace it, and then decide to blind draw my second from the face-down pile; or I could draw two face-down cards to begin with; or I could draw the green card and the other green card next to it; or I could draw a mystery card and then decide to draw the green card now; or I could draw a green card, replace it, and then decide I wanted to draw the new green card in its place; or I could draw a face-up locomotive and end my turn right there, counting it as both draws. Note that if you pull a face-down locomotive (or even two), you still get your normal turn. This only applies to face-up locomotives. This is probably the hardest part to describe theoretically but is straightforward in practice.
My one major criticism is replay-ability and mixed-experience play. Sure, you can replay this game a lot, and the number of card combinations means that it is statistically impossible you’ll have two perfectly identical games. However, as you get more familiar with it, you can start to predict with a reasonable amount of accuracy what routes people are attempting. For instance, if you want Boston, you need to claim that almost immediately, as there is a disproportionately number of tracks that go to Boston for its relative inaccessibility on the map (in a two- or three-player game, there are only two tracks that can get to Boston, and one is through Montreal which is also a hard city to get to). Now, I’m perfectly fine with the competitiveness of who gets there first. The issue I find is that, if someone claims Boston early and you are familiar with the game, you can predict what other tracks they’ll need and block them for no other reason than to block them. This may be okay if you’re only playing with people who are all experienced, but even then, it isn’t much fun and creates a barrier between people who are experienced enough to make those predictions and someone new just learning the game.
Now, I want to expand on what I meant by “accessibility” earlier. I think this is what launched “Ticket to Ride” to the success that it did and can be an interesting template for what makes games (in general, not just indie games) accessible to audiences.
The first is the locality of gameplay. When I said earlier that there are more than half the countries on Earth on fan-made maps, I wasn’t exaggerating. This is a game that can easily be transposed to any setting or culture, and it will still make sense. Compare that to something like Scrabble, which only makes sense in an alphabet-based language. The need to travel, even if just over short distances, is a universal experience. The locale agnosticism that lets it exist anywhere from the London Underground to an entire galaxy makes this work. It helps contextualize the game to any context.
The second is color-blind accessibility. Earlier, I defined the train car cards by color. However, each also has a unique symbol that you can match to and is also shown on the maps. You don’t need to be able to see color to use them. Now, the train car pieces themselves are still color coded without a secondary signifier, but it’s still a notable step in the right direction. Many games (from kids’ games like “Candyland” to something like “The Game of Life” or even fellow indie game superstar “Catan”) rely heavily and in some cases exclusively on color to differentiate between parts. “Ticket to Ride” isn’t perfect about this but is arguably the first major game to engage this on a large scale.
The third is linguistic accessibility. You may have noticed earlier that I used “Nederland” and “Europa” to describe places, despite the spellings of “Netherlands” and “Europe” in English. Generally speaking, when locations have names that can be written natively in Latin script, they are. They don’t anglicize these names, even when advertising the games to an English-speaking audience. Now, obviously some liberties must be taken when describing somewhere like Moscow, a location on the Europa map whose native name is in Cyrillic script. But it does mean that for most people, you can find where you’re from as you would write it. That’s not something normally seen in games at all.
Fourth, it’s inherently similar to games everyone is familiar with. Is claiming tracks that much different from buying property in “Monopoly?” Is collecting colored car combinations unlike collecting sets, runs, or flushes in anything from “Phase 10” to poker? Is getting points for placing down a track different from getting money for completing actions in “The Game of Life”? Not really. It doesn’t feel like a far jump from other games. Notably, it does this without feeling like a rip-off.
Fifth, the number of players changes quite nicely. My other game review this week focuses on a game that I don’t think is super successful at adapting to different group sizes. However, the double-track change between three and four players is a simple but effective change to keep it interesting and fair.
Next, it doesn’t feel like you’re strapping in for endless expansions. One of my main criticisms of “Red Dragon Inn” is that you keep getting more and more expansions, and it doesn’t play well without them. There are nominally more expansions of “Ticket to Ride” than there are “Red Dragon Inn”, once you count the volume of fan-made expansions, but it doesn’t feel like that. You can find one or two editions you like and stick to that. That’s a fully reasonable way of playing this game.
Finally, the game itself is mechanically complex but broken into simple combinations. The mechanics themselves aren’t all that different from anything from “Catan” to “Steampunk Rally” or “Raiders of the North”. The difference is that, in these other games, you’re usually doing everything simultaneously. In “Ticket to Ride,” the simple decision that you can only take one action per turn means you have much less to track at once, which makes it more accessible for a new player. It provides strategy without being overwhelming.
This is what accessibility looks like in gaming. It’s a variety of disparate factors that range from physical accessibility to understandability and mechanical accessibility to comparability to what is known. “Ticket to Ride” does this phenomenally, without feeling like a rip-off of anything else either.
Who would I recommend this game for? Anyone looking to get into indie gaming, anyone wanting to introduce their kids to more complex games, anyone wanting something that plays well for color-blindness, anyone who is a train, geography, or history nerd – this is a versatile game that appeals to a large variety of audiences. But more than anything else, I recommend it for game designers. It does a strong job of providing all types of accessibility without complicating or compromising gameplay in a way rarely seen in the industry.