Sometimes I feel like I’m becoming a curmudgeonly old man. Bitter at the world and have a deep disdain and loathing for ‘fun’. Soon I’ll be chasing the roaming street youths off my lawn with a stick, how dare they play? Everyone should be out working! No one wants to work anymore!

Sorry about that. Ticket to Ride by Alan R. Moon and published by Days of Wonder in 2004 needs no introduction. In a world where the latest and greatest board games get a mere 10,000 copy print run, Ticket to Ride has eclipsed 10 million copies sold. It is eminently popular, beloved by many, and I just don’t understand why!

A game of Ticket to Ride begins with a map. Tones have been printed, so pick your favourite region and go to town. Each player gets a hand of 3 destination tickets, of which you must at least two. Players start with 4 train car cards in their hand, and a pile of plastic trains on front of them. On a player’s turn, they can choose to do one of the following 3 actions:

Take 2 normal coloured cards from the face up display, or the face down draw deck. Unless you take one of the wild face up cards, then you only get to take one.

Play cards to place your trains on the board, and score points for doing so.

Draw 3 more destination cards, which you must keep at least one of those cards, but you can keep all the cards if you wish.

Players continue taking turns until someone has less than 3 trains left. Everyone gets one more turn, then the game is over. At game end, players reveal their destination tickets, and earn points if they were able to connect the two cities on their tickets, and lose points if they failed to do so. There’s also a 10 point bonus to the player who has the longest continual path of trains. Then, the player with the most points is the winner.

Image Credit: @garyjames via BGG

Listen, it’s not that I think Ticket to Ride is a bad game, because it’s not! It’s more that I just don’t understand why it’s so popular. The turns are fast and simple, sure. It’s rules-light, so the whole family can play, okay. There’s a constant stream of new expansions to keep the experience varied, check. But I just find the core of the game utterly uninteresting. So much of the game is just “draw two cards”. Over and Over again.

In 2 and 3 player games, all the double routes are knocked down to 1, making the game tighter at 3 players. I know skilled players can and will watch what routes another player places, and specifically try to get in their way, but at my level of play, it’s fairly arbitrary. There’s no hate drafting going on, each person is just trying to complete their routes. Yes, you could be keeping track of what cards everyone has drawn, and deduce what they can and cannot play on, but in reality, it’s a crapshoot. Destination and hand cards are hidden, and without all that forethought and really watching the board, you don’t know what the other players want to do, and blocking each other becomes accidental, which is frustrating for the person being blocked and boring for the one who is doing the blocking.

Image Credit: @BaSL via BGG

I often find that as the end of the game is drawing near, everyone fills up their hands with useless cards as they mill the deck, trying to get one or two last routes to complete a ticket, ending the game with a mittful of useless cards. Turn after turn is wasted drawing cards from the top of the deck, waiting to draw 2 yellow cards, because nothing else really matters, isn’t my idea of fun. I also hate the idea that some winning strategies can really be to just horde cards for the first 20 turns of the game, then just start placing down routes that work for you.

I played one game recently where I kept two cards with the Vancouver destination. I was 3rd in player order. The first player played 3 trains from Vancouver to Calgary, and the second player played 1 train from Vancouver to Seattle, locking me out of Vancouver for the rest of the game. Like, come on!

I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, but Ticket to Ride is a hard pass from me. Alan R. Moon has designed games I like a lot more, like 10 Days in Europe, Elfenland, and Incan Gold. There’s other route building games that I like a lot more, with actual decisions to make, like Thurn and Taxis and Hansa Tetunoica. Almost anything else would be a better use of my time.

And before anyone gets on my case about how the Europe map has stations that allows you use other players routes, I know. I played it, and it helps the getting blocked out part, but I still find the core of the game boring. Thanks for reading.