Ticket to Ride New York

Ticket to Ride has been around for a long while, and the game has gone through many iterations. From player-on-player games in Europe and North America, to team games in Western Europe, Ticket to Ride is always attempting to do something a little different with each release. Ticket to Ride New York is a huge break from the franchise, bringing forward a very short, very simple experience that is likely to draw in more players than a traditional game in the franchise would? But is it worth owning? Let’s dive in and take a look!

 Goal of the Game

The ultimate goal in Ticket to Ride New York is to obtain routes between cities that need to be completed, complete those routes by collecting and playing coloured cab cards, and ultimately trying to earn more points than your opponents. Points can be earned by completing routes and connecting your routes to famous landmarks in New York City. The person with the most points ultimately wins.

 Setup

Setting up Ticket to Ride New York is incredibly simple. Once the board has been laid out flat in the middle of the table, each player (up to 4) will select on of the colours available, and collects all the plastic cabs of that colour. The deck of route cards are shuffled, and each player is dealt two. The stack of cab cards are also shuffled, and each player is dealt two of these as well. Once all players have been given two cards, 5 will be flipped face up and placed along the edge of the board, and the deck will be placed somewhere within reach. Before the game starts, players will have to decide whether to keep both of their route tickets, or just one. At least one must be kept.

 How to Play

There are three actions players can perform on their turn. They can either draw two cab cards – either face-up or from the deck, although if a face-up wild cab is drawn (multi-coloured), players cannot choose another card – use cab cards from their hands to build routes on the board – matching the colours to the route being built (grey routes can be completed with any single colour of cab cards) – or they can draw two new route cards, of which they need to keep one.

In a 2 player game, the double routes on the board cannot be claimed by both players; in a 3-4 player game, two separate players can claim the side-by-side routes.

The game ends when one players has 2 or less plastic cabs left in their supply; that person will receive an extra turn.

 Is it Good?

Ticket to Ride New York is a unique experience because of how short the game actually is. A regular game of Ticket to Ride – depending on the number of players – could go from 45 minutes to an hour and fifteen, while New York can be finished in under 10 if all players understand what they are doing. As a long time Ticket to Ride fan, I’d quickly say that getting Ticket to Ride New York, for adults who own other games, is not a great purchasing decision. Outside of that group of people, however, this could be the perfect way to introduce yourselves, or others, to a fantastic franchise.

Not only is this game great fro introducing people to the franchise, but also works well with kids, and trumps the Ticket to Ride: First Journey edition which is meant for kids age 7+. Ticket to Ride New York is much more alike to the rest of the games in the franchise, and would be the ideal way to quickly graduate children from the New York version, to the Europe or North American versions. In my home, the ultimate goal is to graduate my kids to more advanced board games as quickly as possible, and after only 3 or 4 games of Ticket to Ride New York, my oldest son was ready to tackle something with a bit more challenge.

Ultimately, Ticket to Ride New York is a great package, providing all the basic rules that will help someone graduate from this ten to fifteen minute experience, to something with more strategy and more options. I won’t play this often in the future, but I can see my son playing with friends, or my wife and I using it as a learning tool to teach people who aren’t well versed in the Ticket to Ride formula. For a relatively low price, the average person would deem this a good add to your board game collecting.