Ticket to Ride: Right on Track
Written: Sep 14 '09
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Product Rating:
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Pros: great game, great strategy, decent AI, great add-ons
Cons: Sound issues, intermittent music, board visualization issues
The Bottom Line: I'm still against downloadable games, but this is still a good one.
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| kjell1979's Full Review: Ticket to Ride for Xbox 360 |
Ticket to Ride has become the most popular game to play during the course of this summer. Now that my kids are growing up a little bit, I find that they can handle more complicated board games than the inane Candy Land. Though my son, 5, still is on the cusp of learning to read we still have to play the simpler games we can on occasion break out more complicated titles. We're still a year or two away from Monopoly due to the ability for my daughter to make change for a $500 bill and Risk due to the time it takes to complete a game, but it's a good game that has lots of strategy.
So I had some spare gamer points kicking around my Xbox Live account and decided to give Ticket to Ride a whirl since I had the board game it might make a good way to play when you don't have a lot of other people to play with. I have always been against downloadable games when I do not get them for free (see Catan and Carcassonne), but I made a small exception here.
Gameplay
The rules of Ticket to Ride are fairly basic. The object of the game is to outscore your opponents. You accomplish this by completing train routes from city to city across a map of North America (US and Southern Canada). The longer the route (from one to six lengths long) the more points you get. You also have destination cards which include two cities on different parts of the map (i.e. Chicago to Los Angeles or New York to Seattle) worth a certain amount of points. If you complete this destination, you get that amount of points; however if you fail to complete that destination you lose that many points. You complete routes by collecting train cards. Each train card has a different color. The routes on the map have a certain colors and you complete the route by playing cards of that same number and color. There are also grey tiles which allow you to play any common color of a certain length (i.e. six red or six blue for a six tiled grey route). You collect cards by either drawing two from a pile of face down cards (a blind draw) or choosing from five face-up cards. If there's a wild card, you can only choose one card that turn.
The rules are basic but the strategy can get rather deep. Not only are you concerned about completing your destinations, you also have to worry about other players taking routes to block you. When playing with four or five players, there are double routes which allow two different players to complete a route between two adjacent cities. However in games with two or three players those double routes can only be completed once. Identifying your opponents' routes is essential to taking cards they need or claiming bottleneck routes on the game board. Ticket to Ride becomes a much deeper game the more you play it and realize how much you have to disguise your strategy while trying to foil your opponents'.
Ticket to Ride doesn't feature a ton of rule variations in the basic game in the option menu. Most of the options allow you to toggle the music or sound effects volume. There are a few other things you can do like change the default color or configure your Xbox Live webcam. The achievements are fairly easy to obtain. You have to purchase the add-on packs like the 1910 and European maps to complete all 250 gamer score points. Beyond the downloadable packs, there are a few troublesome achievements like playing 50 matches or winning 25 ranked matches online, but all are still attainable when the game is played enough.
The multiplayer aspect is a solid aspect to Ticket to Ride. You can play online with five players including yourself. One of the drawbacks is many people aren't online very much anymore, especially when it comes to the expansion games. You can play a local multiplayer game where you take turns playing on the same TV. Your opponents will have to refrain from peeking at the screen during your turn. But overall Ticket to Ride offers a sound if not vanilla multiplayer experience.
The downloadable content is pretty good. The 1910 expansion to the North America map costs 400 MS points ($5) and offers new destinations as well as three additional rules to play by. The rules allow you to connect to just the major cities. Another rule addition brings in new routes plus the out of print Mystery Train expansion destinations as well as a ten point Globetrotter card. The final rule change combines all the destinations and bonus point cards into what's called the "Mega Game". All three variations are neat and add quite a few new dynamics to the game.
The European map cost 600 MS points ($7.50) and offers a new maps and a new variations to the core rules. It introduces ferries where you must complete the route with a locomotive card. It also has tunnels where you must draw cards and complete the route using the colors on the cards that you drew. It adds a new element of luck to the core game. The final gameplay addition to the game is stations. By placing a station you can complete a route that has already been claimed at the expense of a certain point value. I'm not a big fan of this rule variation but it does add in a few new things to think about in the European version.
Overall the gameplay is really solid and there are few complaints that I can think of with the rules and strategy involved in Ticket to Ride. Most games end up being very unique and lead to a lot of competitive gaming amongst your opponents.
Controls
The controls are pretty basic but they're also logical as well. The various face buttons map to different actions in the game. The X button claims a route, the Y button allows you to draw train cards, and the B button draws 3 destination cards too. What's great is you can go back if you haven't committed to an action yet. It even warns you before you take your destination cards in the event of a thumb slip. This is a really nice touch and a level of polish not often seen in the video game world. Right and left bumpers switch between active destination tickets on the map. This is really useful for planning out your intermediate routes. The right and left triggers zoom in and out on the map. This is a crucial control because it helps you to better distinguish the color of routes and whether or not they are claimed. When zoomed out, it can be tough to decipher the status of a given route. Overall the controls are very straightforward and easy to adapt to.
Graphics
The graphics are pretty decent; however they also suffer from a few problems as well. The game doesn't quite come alive the same way as more modern iterations of board games like Monopoly. But there are a few animations that clue you into where someone recently claimed a route such as the puffing of the smoke. The board itself is flat but the game pieces do provide a polygonal third dimension such that it feels as if you're playing the board game. The biggest issue is that when zoomed all the way out, it's really tough to tell red routes from purple ones. When zoomed in it gets a little better but can still be confusing. But aside from that the game does provide some decent graphics even if they aren't terribly flashy.
Sound
The sound is one of the weakest aspects of Ticket to Ride. The music is ambient, but it's also very intermittent. That is it will only play for a minute or so before finishing off and you're serenaded with silence for 5 minutes or so. The music is a very 1800's western music from the piano to the guitar songs reminiscent of that era. It's actually a rather nice touch.
The same goes with the sound effects. The sound effects feature many different mechanical sounds that appear out of no where. Sure there are the event-based sound effects, but the background ones are way too intermittent. The final annoyance with the sound effects is playing local multiplayer. If you have someone in the same room with you while taking turns playing the game, the completed route sound effect will still sound thus alerting someone when they've completed a destination. That changes the balance of the game quite a bit.
Replay Value
The replay value is very high for this game. It's mostly because it lies in the strength of the board game itself and the options placed before us that only a video game can accomplish. Ticket to Ride is a game that features many different strategies and outcomes. The number of routes is finite and quite skimpy in my mind such that it's rather easy to tell which route someone is going for. Still Ticket to Ride is a fun game to play. The computer AI is challenging to compete with even on normal difficulty and playing against other human players either locally on online will bring you back over and over. The classic North American map can appear stale when you've upgraded to the 1910 or European expansions, but that only serves to create more longevity. This is a popular game in our house and it should be in yours.
The value of Ticket to Ride comes down to basic numbers. The retail version of the physical Ticket to Ride is $50. The 1910 Expansion is $20, and the European version is another $50. Whereas the Xbox Live arcade game is $10 (800 MS Points) for Ticket to Ride, $5 (400 MS Points) for the 1910 Expansion, and $7.50 (600 MS Points) for the European version. So you can get all 3 for $22.50 (1800 MS Points) versus $120 for the physical versions. While $120 is a little steep (I could probably find all three games for around $75), $22.50 is a bargain. This is definitely a game that's fun to play, easy to learn, but fulfilling to play with friends because it offers so much strategy. The funny part is you'll probably end up playing the European expansion more than any other game since it offers a little deeper gameplay at the expense of more complicated rules. Overall this is definitely a game worth considering for your gaming library.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
kjell1979
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Location: Oxford, Mass
Reviews written: 283
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