Ticket to Ride

No, this is not a post about the popular song released by the Carpenters in 1969. I am not offering you free passage on an airline of your choice. Or an amusement park ride for that matter.

On the contrary, I am finally getting around to telling you about the game I wrote about in this post. Hopefully you didn't hold your breath too long waiting for a review. So, without further adieu...

Ticket to Ride Europe is a fun, entertaining game for all ages. It is a lot like the USA version, with a few variations. After reading the directions, Mom and I played. The instructions were easy to understand, and this could have been partly due to the fact that we already knew the basic rules of the game.

While looking at the game board, I decided that I should look at a map of Europe to learn what the cities are. Several of them are easy to guess, such a Kyiv (Kiev), Roma (Rome), and Athina (Athens), while others are more difficult to know what the "modern-day" name is--names like Brindisi, Dieppe, and Sevastopol. I guess I'm not too up on my European cities. Hmmmm... I guess this game is also educational--if I took the time to look up the names!

The game board is a map of Europe with various routes between cities. Each route requires a certain number of a player's trains to be played to connect the cities--as few as one train or as many as eight trains.

Destination tickets (pictured above) show a train route between two cities. Each route is worth a certain number of points (the minimum number of trains required to connect the two cities) and there is no limit to the number of destinations you can gather during the game.

At the end of the game, points are awarded for each destination you successfully complete; however, points are deducted if you don't complete a destination.

The player having the longest continuous train at the end of the game receives ten bonus points. As my niece Callie found out the hard way, make sure you are familiar where the cities are or you may end up going to Stockholm when you really needed to go to Smolensk. Oops! I'm sure she'll remember that part of geography the next time she plays.

After all our points for destinations and longest train were calculated at the end of the game, you'll see how Mom and I ended the first game.

Yes, it was a tie!! However, because I had the longest train, that was the tie breaker. This is definitely a game I would recommend, and I can't wait to play it when we go camping next week!