My 3rd review so far! Hope you enjoy!

Ticket to Ride: the Card Game

Where it comes from...

Everybody knows Ticket to Ride. Big map, lots of color coded cards, a few wild cards in the middle, plastic train pieces in 5 different colors to accomodate up to 5 players. The idea is to play several cards of the same color at once so to cover the railroad connecting two cities. If on top of that you manage to connect specific cities indicated by the secret ticket cards... then you get some extra points. You also get bonus points for the longest continuous railroud on the map. Whenever you connect two cards on the map, you score depending on how long the railroad is.

Ticket to Ride: the Card Game, picks up the premiss of it's big sis, puts away the big board and the plastic train pieces, adds some new "Big City Bonus" cards, tweaks some rules, and... tadaaaa! Ticket to Ride: the Card Game.


What? No map?... so... how does it work?

The game mechanics is basicaly the same, you have a few wagon cards in your hand (same color coded system), some are open on the table, also you get up to 6 ticket cards at the beginning of the game, these show you which colors you need to complete the track, for example: connecting chicago and san francisco requires one white, one yellow, one violet and one orange card, and is worth 16 points.

On your turn you may take up to 2 wagon cards from the ones on the table and/or from the faced down deck; or you may take one Locomotive card that is on the table.

OR

you may take 4 ticket cards and keep as many as you like

OR

you may play several cards of the same color (2 minimum)

OR

you may play exactly 3 cards of different colors.

If you play wagon cards, you place them face up on YOUR "railyard" (you playing area). At the beginning of your turn, if you have cards on your railyard, you may place one card of each color you have on it, face down on your "On-the-track-stack"! This is where the game becomes a memory game! you play cards according to your most worthy tickets, and then you play more cards for your other tickets, and they keep accumulating on your "on-the-track-stack" (OTTS hence forth) until you're not so sure anymore which tickets you got resolves so far. The rules explicitly disallow looking into your own "OTTS"! (except as an optional rule!).

After the wagon deck runs out (once with 2/3 players or twice with 4 players), the game ends. Now players grab their OTTS and match all the accumulated wagon cards with the requisits of their ticket cards. Each wagon card obviously may be used only once,
so if you end up with some colors you can't match with some of your last tickets, and lack the required colors for those... no can do!
And should you end up with some unresolved tickets... then that's some minus points for you! (This was a rhyme)

Also, now you got the Big City Ponus cards. These cards are worth less points then many of the tickets... but may just be that tiny difference you needed for victory... or not! and you still lose. These cards are related to one specific city, each a different city. The player who "sold" most of the tickets to any of these cities, gets that card and adds it's value to the total score.

That's Basically how the game works.


So how does it compare to the mapped one?

My personal opinion is that the original game is a very easy to grasp, nice looking, very light family board game. There is a lot of luck involved in the cards other players don't pick up before you do it, and also with the tickets you get. Very sincerely... and this might shock some of you! I always looked at this game as a fairly overproduced game. It looks much better then it plays. Don't get me wrong, it's a fine game. I just think of it as slightly overproduced for the gamepley it provides. I mean... in the end! if you look at it, the game really is just about a bunch of cards! You just use the map and the plastic wagons to keep track of the cards you played, and your score.

So this game should, in my opninion be called "Ticket to Ride: the pocket version" The subtitle "the card game" is redundent really, since it has never been anything else!

Since they took away some of the components they had to come up with some ways to adapt the rules. Let's see:

The rule tweeking...

On the original game, since you had a map, every city had a limited number of connections, which means, not all players could get every city, and if they did... chance was, the route they needed to take was already occupied by another player, so they had to go around! So here is a pseudo confrontational aspect to this game: players are able to interfere in opponents plans, although more on chance then rather on reazoning, since the goals are secret, thus, pure speculation. This rule naturally doesn't work in this version for obvious reasons. So they did come up with an adaptation: to make "access" to cities more difficult. Supose I got among several other cards, 2 white wagon cardson my railyard. If one of my opponents plays 3 or more white wagon cards, I lose all my white ones, if he has only 2 or 1 white wagon cards... he may play none of those, since he must have more then I. This rule doesn't really have any connection to the theme. I understand the need of implementing it, thus providing some element of "pseudo competition", but it's not a very good rule per se and I must say, that to me, this rule feels very out of context.

But it is really the ONLY rule in this game that gives players the capability of rising bariers to other players, but yet again, you don't really know what your opponents need, so unless you manage to play more cards of one color your opponent has on his/her railyard (thus you can figure he/she needs that color), you can't really do much about you opponents that wouldn't be a lucky guess or simply because you yourself need what you going to play (which is the most obvious motivation for playing certain cards).

The Big City Bonus cards are a kind of substitute to the longest track bonus, adapted to the the highest number of tickets connecting to a specific city (there are 6 different cities with values ranging from 8 to 15 points).

Finally, and thanks to the OTTS, this game ends up feeling a bit like yatzie. right? in yatzie you roll dice 3 times and try to combine your rolls to the best possible results. In this game you collect many cards on your OTTS, and at the end of the game you try to combine your "results" into the best possible city connections, in yatzie you combine numbers (1-6) and in here you combine colors, its very basic really. So whereas the original Ticket to Ride felt more like an actual card game... this one is slightly arkward in the regad that you can't really be sure that the cards you played will add up to what you need which results in the former game being a game where you control what you got but you can't foresee who's going to screw your plan, and this latter one being a game where you know what you play, you also know what you need... but you don't really know whether you'll be able to match it up... this might sound somewhat confusing... but you'll get it after you play it.


Ze final vord!
Well... honestly, to my mind, this game is quite a gimmick. It's called "the card game" version of a game that was already a card game in it's essence. Also, the rules that have been adapted to this one, are really just adaptations, so there is absolutely nothing new about this game. I think that with this game, Days of Wonder (probably for the first time so far) did hit the wrong key. It would have made much more sence the other way around, if this game had been the first to come out as just "Ticket to Ride" and then, the actual "Ticket to Ride" could have been published as the "Revised Delux Edition". Therefore, my sincere advice is:

-If you own Ticket to ride, don't bother getting this one (unless you're an absolute "Ticket to Ride" loone who must have it all!!)
-If you don't have it but know you like it, I'd probably recommend the original board game, since it looks very nice and quite honestly, the price of the card game version is not so far below of the original game.

There is no reason I would buy this just because I can take it along, there are many games out there that are far superior + smaller + cheaper that you can take along. So you can play ticket to ride back home after you had your holidays.

Nevertheless, it still is a fun game that you can playe with up to 4 players (it doesn't play very well with 2 players in my oppinion), especially if you don't feel like buying the original version because, as me, you feel it's too overproduced for what it is, which obviously reflects on the price. In relative terms the card game is much more expensive, but in actual terms, you'll pay more money for the original version.

Summing it up
For the (nevertheless) reasonable fun it provides, the great card quality, but an unfortunate price, not so smooth and "contextual" rule tweeking and also for what I feel is a foul play by DoW in publishing a somewhat redundent game*... I give it a 6.5!

*For a very good example of a work well done in this regard I'd suggest comparing with Kosmo's "Starfahrers of Catan" and the small 2-player version "Starship Catan"