My wife and I do like train games almost as much as card games. When we found the new “Ticket to Ride” (Zug um Zug) card game in our favorite gamestore we bought that game immediately without even reading the rules or playing a demo game against the store owner! Hmm ... strange reaction, even for myself! But hey, it’s a train card game!

What you get:

80 Train cards (10 in each color)
16 Locomotives
46 Destination ticket cards
6 Big cities bonus cards
1 Rulebook(let)

The theme of the cards is similar to the existing TTR, but at the other side the game is pretty expensive for less than 150 cards (at least in Switzerland).

Rules:

I won’t mention all the rules here (you’ll find the rules online), but like the original board game the rules may be explained in several minutes.

You have 3 possible play actions:

You draw 1 or 2 cards the same way as in the board games
You lay down 2 or more cards of one color, or exactly 3 cards of 3 colors in front of you to build (future) routes.
You draw 0 - 4 new routes.

Routes are not build immediately but in future steps. Each time when it’s your turn you take the top card of each color you have already layed down in front of you and take them away in your stack of cards which is hidden even to you until the end of game. Your goal is to have enough cards in this stack to build your selected routes at the end of the game.

There is even the possibility that cards you have layed down are removed by your opponent (a train robbery).

Gameplay:

When we played the game for the first time we had problems to remember all the cards we already had in our hidden stacks. Of course you don’t have to remember the cards used for completed routes, but all the cards that are in the stack for further use. At the end we both had a some unused cards in our stacks that could have been easily used to build one or two more routes.

There is not that much interaction between the players, and given the fact that you have to concentrate pretty much on your own cards this is definitely not a loud party game.

Conclusion:

For me this is a 2 players game. Having 3 or 4 players around I would stick with the original board game because of the lack of interaction.

The game is easy to learn, fast in play and ain’t as heavy as a for an example RftG and that’s ok for us. I’m not sure how the game will do after 20 games, but as it’s a very small game, it easily could make it’s way into the small games box for our summer vacancies in greece!

And as I said in the beginning: What could be possibly wrong about a train card game?

Greetings from Switzerland,

Bernhard