After hooking my girlfriend on Carcassonne that is all she ever wanted to play, six months later I was looking for another game to get her hooked on. We had played Carcassonne to death and it was high time for a new game! Now, being that I always wanted Ticket to Ride and that I had played it online a few times I figured I would give it a shot. Man did I hit the jackpot!

Ticket to Ride is a very light and simple set matching game with a train theme for 2-5 players. It runs about 45 minutes with the full compliment of players that know the game and about 25-30 minutes for two who know the game. And somewhere in between for three to four players who know it. The game is very easy to teach to non-gamers being that the rules are only about three pages. It comes with a ton of very colorful pieces and cards and a big board. And finally, it retails for about $45 but you can find it online for around $30.

The components are very nice. Typical of a Days of Wonder game, you get a ton of very nice, colorful, plastic pieces. You have five player colors in red, green, blue, yellow, and black with 45 train pieces each. You get five wooden, round, score markers in each of the player colors. The game also includes a deck of resource cards and destination cards. And finally, it comes with a nice big board of the United States. The only real complaint about the components is the size of the cards. They are tiny! For some reason, instead of including normal sized cards Days of Wonder decided to go with these miniature cards that seem like they are made for toddlers! However, this has been fixed with the release of the USA 1910 expansion which comes with a bonus set of normal sized resource cards and destination tickets.

The game set up is very easy and takes all of about two or three minutes. You simply shuffle the deck of resource cards and destination cards and pass out the appropriately colored trains to each player. You then take the round scoring disk for the colors that are in play and place them on the 1 on the scoring track. Next, you pass out four of the resource cards to each player and three destination cards to each player. The players then decide which destinations they want to keep (you have to take two). Next, you take the top five cards of the resource deck and turn them face up next to the deck as this will comprise your available resources during the game. Now you are ready to play!

The game play is incredibly fun as well! Each turn the players will get to take one action. They can either take two resource cards from the face up cards (When you choose your first you flip another card from the deck immediately. Also, if you take a rainbow resource that is your only draw for the turn.), two resource cards from the top of the deck, one resource card from the face up resources and one from the top of the deck, you can choose to take new destination cards or you can play a set of cards to connect cities. The goal of the game is to have completed the most destinations across the US by the end of the game. You do this by collecting sets of resource cards in one of a few different colors as well as wild trains that can count for any color and then playing them and placing your trains on the colored track on the board between the cities you want to connect. For example, say I wanted to connect New York to Boston and the track between those two cities was three blue rectangles, I would play three blue resource cards from my hand and then place three of my trains on that track.

For every number of trains you place you score a number of points. For one train you score one, two trains you score two, three trains scores four points, four trains scores seven points, five trains scores ten points, and six trains scores 15 points. In addition to the colored spaces on the board there are also gray spaces. You place trains on these by playing any set of one color cards that you want. The end of the game comes when someone has played either all of their trains, or is down to just one or two trains. At this point, you finish the current round and each player takes one more additional turn. After this has been completed every player flips their destination cards over to reveal their completed or incomplete destinations! If you completed your destinations you get the number of points indicated in the bottom right of the card. If you didn't complete your destination then you subtract the number of points on the card from your total score. Additionally, the person with the largest number of continuous trains gets the Longest Train card. This is worth an extra ten points that certainly makes or breaks a close game!

Overall, this is just a heck of a game. It scales well from two to five and is easily accessible by anyone! My mom loved the game and right after the first game that my girlfriend and I played, she wanted to play again! You get a lot of bang for your buck considering the large board and the number of pieces that come with the game. This is definitely one of my favorite games and I would recommend this game to anyone who is new to board gaming or just needs a good simple game for their collection. It is sure to be a hit with any crowd! I give the game a 9 out of 10!

Nice review. If you're playing with two, consider getting the 1910 Expansion and playing with the Big City rules. Makes for a much more contentious and exciting game. Even if you don't use one of the 1910 rule variants, it's worth it for the bigger cards (they replace the tiny cards in the base game, and add more for the three variants).

(Or your boyfriend or husband for that matter.)

My wife, who never gamed before we married, prefers:
Zooloretto
The Traders of Genoa
Nexus Ops
Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers
Hansa
Blue Moon City
Elfenland
RoboRally
Tigris & Euphrates
Dungeon Twister
The Pillars of the Earth
Ark
Tikal
(Among other things.)

My wife is hooked with Ticket to Ride. Not a heavy game, but it certainly has more strategy than initially meets the eye. Now if I could get her to play Combat Commander...

My girlfriend likes it well enough, but I need to be careful of playing it with her. She always seems to win when we play a two-handed game.

I agree with the purchase of the 1910 expansion. It's plum necessary if you plan on just getting the original TTR, and skipping Europe and Marklin.

I'm surprised (Joe) that Anno 1503 and Starship Catan are not on this list. These seem to go over well with the fairer sex and are good two player games.

Grrr.

There are no significant gender biases in game tastes. I've done the stats to death (eg here and here) and M/F game preferences amongst BGG members align big time. Perhaps there's a time constraint (women tend to have less "play" time than men in general) meaning that the tiny percentage of men who play lengthy meaty games are mirrored by an even tinier percentage of women.

My gal pal doesn't care for TtR at all - prefers UP.

Thanks for taking the time to point this out, Joe.

Ticket to Ride is a great game for light/casual/non-fanatical/moderately disinterested gamers, but the assumption that these people are always female (and that the default BGG user is male) bugs me a bit sometimes.

Perhaps among Geeks, but I doubt that's true among the general population.

Yeah Joe. How unpolitically correct to suggest that there's a difference between men and women. Shame on you!

(rant mode on)
I don't see why. The geeky gamer end of women demonstrably looks just like the geeky gamer end of men... in the absence of hard data to the contrary it's significantly more likely that the "geeky end" stems from a similar overall base line in each gender.

When I approach random folks at work for gaming I get a similar response from men and women. The people I game with are made up in gender proportion to the people I've invited, and each has their own tastes. My extremely extended family (about 100 adults now) shows no particular gender biases I can think of in which games they prefer. My university days were littered with a mix of gaming men and women of a variety of preferences. Card players, role players, the standard party games, Cosmic, a few quirky games, and eventually Settlers (post uni, for me)... I knew more men than women, and in proportion I knew more male gamers at each level of dedication.

Every experience I have suggests to me that gaming taste distribution is similar between genders, assuming you can get someone to play a game at all with an open mind... if you can't get them to play at all then choice of game is a moot point.

If you expect the reception to be different, being a human being you will:
a) more likely approach men than women, and end up gaming with more men
b) bias your choice of games according to the genders playing
c) ascribe gender-based preferences where they align with your expectation and make individual exceptions for the cases where people break your expectation.

Time and again experiments show humans see patterns when there are none. And a human will see a pattern aligned with their expectation even when the data actually contradicts that pattern.

Every piece of actual data I can observe suggests there is no significant bias along gender lines.

(end rant mode. thank you for listening.)

at the time of this posting there is one (1) female in the top 100 of ranked chess.

i have always found women to be much less fond of direct confrontation in games. other examples include video games and poker.

here's a writeup of a stanford study that sought to analyze the effect of video games on the human brain, both male and female.

Justin these posts are interesting, and indicate (as I implied above) that obviously you only get to worry about what games your partner might like if they enjoy gaming at all. My personal experience is I know a similar portion of men and women who enjoy a game from time to time, though I agree more men who get obsessed.

There may well be a difference in the number of men who get obsessed by gaming and the number of women who get obsessed by gaming.

I don't think there's any underlying difference in game tastes.

unless one wants to suggest that women are less capable of playing chess on a competitive level, i think a 1% representation in the international top 100 can only hint that women, as a matter of taste, are simply not as fond of the game. do you have another explanation to offer?



the video game study found a physiological difference in satisfaction derived from its specific game, not a general proclivity for obsession.

a) Women generally assign quite a bit less time to recreational activity than men do in Western countries, for whatever combination of reasons you may cite. To "compete" internationally at a recreational activity requires excessive dedication of time.
b) Ability to *win*, beyond basic "I get my share", has little to do with enjoyment.
c) Slightly more tongue in cheek, but when faced with an option to sell your life and soul to the bloody-minded pursuit of a single goal such as achieving international standard in a game or a seven figure income instead of a six figure income, generally I reckon women seem a lot saner than men.

The (very small scale) study showed, very specifically, a difference in neural activation for partaking of a video game. How that relates to subjective perception of "this activity is more enjoyable than that activity" is not addressed, though it's relationship to addiction is implied in the commentry.

Pardon me I should have said "addicted to gaming" rather than "obsessed by gaming", and pardon you for relating addiction to video gaming to enjoyment of social board games.

The enjoyment/payback dynamics of video games are totally different from the enjoyment/payback of social board games... similarly for example to the way that enjoyment of strenuous physical activity is different from enjoyment of social board games.

video games and board games, strenuous physical activity and board games? do you really want to make that comparison?



completely unsubstantiated. why focus on western countries anyway? look at the national representation in the top 100.



ok, then how do you explain spelling bees, contract bridge, figure skating, gymnastics, softball, dancing, and skiing for example?



that is another assertion, and a personal annotation.

chess is hundreds of years old, language-neutral, internationally renowned, largely mental, can be played cheaply or free, and requires only one opponent. i'm challenged to think of a better example for a population-inclusive game. a 99:1 male to female ratio is huge, and i think it demands a more sound explanation than what you have provided. a signifigant interest gap in direct conflict games makes sense to me, and it's a pattern i've observed throughout my life.

It would be absurd to think the enjoyment factors in video games are related to the enjoyment factors in board games. Video games (especially noting the one designed for that study) are real time reflexive... absolutely nothing like playing a board game.

Well, unsubstantiated in this forum anyway but thoroughly substantiated in research. I only say "in Western countries" because that's the only studies I've noticed.

What do you mean "explain"? Do you have notes on the total human effort dedicated to these activities?

If you are trying to assert that people you know only or even primarily enjoy things they "win" at, well, your observation of humanity is quite different from mine. People may well dedicate more attention to things they're good at. But we're talking enjoyment, not success.

It's actually a tiny difference. The chess rankings follow, what, 160 thousand players? You could hypothesise that the male players are 0.06% more skilled (it's a spatial game after all) or 0.06% more dedicated than the female players, and hence see a totally male dominated top 100.

Which still has nothing to do with enjoyment, and very little to do even with how many people are playing the game. You're assuming registration with an organisation is strongly correlated with recreational play in both genders.

You're also assuming participation rates correlate with how much a non-participant would enjoy it if they tried it.

I participate in a large variety of games and activities. Very few of them have ever seen me register at any event of any sort related to those activities. The ones that I might turn up in participation stats somewhere, eg skiing or squash playing, are enjoyable but not top of my list. And not things I'm terribly good at either.

Oh and one more point... I would say Chess is not close to central in the spectrum of possible games. It's not a terribly good choice of median from which to try to extrapolate general tastes in games.

Even among pure abstract games, Chess is fairly strategically heavyweight.

another sweeping, unqualified, unscientific statement.



many video games are not "real time reflexive", and many board games are. furthermore, mechanics are not the subject.



and still uncited. if western-only statistics are even meaningful, are we supposed to take your word their existence and quality?



if women don't "compete" internationally at a recreational activity because it requires excessive dedication of time, why does that not seem to apply to the things i mentioned?



no such thing was stated. i only pointed out that you stated opinion as fact, which would be true whether or not i agreed with you.



i asked directly for your own reasoning, not what one might hypothesize. it seems to me that you're more interested in not being wrong than you are in seeking the truth.



haven't you done exactly what you accuse by making taste declarations based on data from bgg users?



yet the rules are simple enough for a child to learn.

chess is just one example that sprung to mind. i also mentioned video games and poker. "the sims" is a non-confrontational sales blockbuster, and it has an estimated 60% female player base. do you think, say, call of duty 4 is doing nearly as well with females? why or why not? one can watch a televised world series of poker event or head to a cardroom to see the extent to which men make up the majority of that game. how do you explain that? i've seen tastes differ between the sexes on movies, magazines, tv, cars, fashion, sports, relationships, and all sorts of other things. i don't see why you think it so contentious that there might be one more thing.

Though they were explicitly the subject of that small scale study you quoted. A real-time reactive video game. Nothing like the experience of the vast majority of board games.

I didn't say women don't compete. I said women in general are less inclined to compete.

You are trying to imply that because more men win at international Chess at grand master level, then therefore an arbitrary man would enjoy chess more than an arbitrary woman. After all, where we started from here (and what you are trying to support) is whether an arbitrary woman is going to enjoy Lost Cities more than an arbitrary man would.

Merely pointing out that the "top 100 chess player" as data is useless in this discussion.

Indeed. Almost exactly what I've done.

Is that relevant? Enjoying Chess is enjoying an activity not representative of boardgaming in general. Winning at Chess is winning at an activity not representative of boardgaming in general.

When it comes down to it, playing games of some sort is a mainstream activity. Most cultures seem to have some form of recognised recreational gaming. But it's a somewhat more minority activity to regularly play Chess, or anything of that much strategic complexity, and especially for people to play with anything like the seriousness and dedication that goes into international competition. If there are inherent gender differences informing the top 100 Chess player gender bias, it seems at least as likely to be a different take on the very same point you make... being wired to feel more competitive, men would be generally more likely to take gaming to a competition level.

You keep referring to video games. It's not relevant.

You're back into the competitive levels again. There are few publicised competetive activities open to men and women equally which I've heard of which have equal representation at the competitive level. Mostly, I suspect, because fewer women are inclined to dedicate that much time to such an arbitrary purpose.

Well you've seen attention levels and consumption differ. Not sure about enjoyment. I enjoy mostly the same clothes my wife does... though we don't wear the same clothes.

Relationships... now there's a whole different story.

Really don't care whether the average generic woman and average generic man like the same games. My only concern is whether the specific people I'm gaming with (men and women) can agree on and enjoy a game.

that's a separate issue, but i think the burden is on you to show there's no relationship. maybe you could start with bsw, heh.



i've spent many hours in casinos, and i've seen tons of women at the slot machines. probably more women than men. they're not against gambling, because there they are. as for competitive levels of poker, one doesn't even need to know the rules because they're dealer-enforced. they could play poker by simply choosing a different chair, but they don't. if a beatable game is an arbitrary purpose, then i can't imagine what that says about slots and why allegedly time-conservative women might play them.

reminded again of the many differences between the sexes, i don't understand why this specific subject would be worthy of exception. it's not prejudice, it's not good, it's not bad, it's just different. i have no illusion of changing your beliefs here, i'm mostly taking task with the suggestion that you have statistically proven anything outside the realm of bgg members that also rate games. i'd be happy enough to get past that and shake hands.

Sorry, but that just doesn't make sense. Usually the burden in research is to demonstrate (and/or explain) a relationship, not demonstrate a lack of one.

Why would we even begin to suppose that there was a connection between someone's reaction to video gaming (generally spatial, real time, reflexive, frequently solitary) and someone's reaction to board gaming (generally information management, reasoning, contemplative, almost always social)? They share nothing in common other than "you do it for fun"... which is a rather huge and diverse category. Most video gaming even manages to get its usual "reactions" in solo play, so it's not even anything to do with competing against people.