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
Traders of Genoa
Nexus Ops
Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers
Hansa
Blue Moon City
Elfenland
RoboRally
Tigris & Euphrates
Dungeon Twister
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.)