Ticket to Ride is Easy to Learn, and Fun To Play this Holiday Season

If you are relatively new to the board game world – and in this instance, games like Monopoly, The Game of Life, and yes even Catan do not count – there are a few games we like to call gateway experiences to the wider world of detailed, specific games. Ticket to Ride is currently sitting on the cusp of the casual versus hardcore board game players, but it is still an excellent title to get to the table for those less savvy friends and family.

Thanks to Asmodee Canada, we’ve been playing Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries, but treat this article as a reason to purchase ANY of the Ticket to Ride games this holiday season!

Ticket to Ride has a fairly basic concept that is pretty easy to understand – build trains using train cards so you connect destinations on the tickets in your hand. The most points wins. There is light strategy here, but nothing to intense. For example, sometimes the shortest route from A to B isn’t the best option, especially if you can loop multiple tickets together by using less trains. See, if you focus solely on one card before the next, you are bound to run out of trains to build, and won’t score as many tickets. If you properly plan your routes across the board, you can hit more destinations, resolving more tickets, getting higher scores.

And while it might sound like a cop-out to write a quick and easy article, that’s really it. Sure, there are a few additional rules like how you build tunnels – this can make you use more cards than you want – or using wild cards for ferries, the core concept is clearly outlined above, and all of the Ticket to Ride games follow this general mechanic.

If it’s this quick to write about, it is equally as quick to play – so grab a copy of Ticket to Ride this holiday season and be sure to get your friends and family in on the action. There is a lot to like about this one, and it might be the perfect game to play to peak someone’s interest in deeper experiences!