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Ticket to Ride

Ticket to Ride

Asmodee's PlayLink adaptation of the tabletop favourite is just the ticket. All aboard!

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It's time to hop onto the board game express as Asmodee Digital brings the hugely popular Ticket To Ride to PlayStation's PlayLink system. The multi award-winning railway-based board game developed by Days Of Wonder has sold millions of copies worldwide, and has also spawned many variations both analogue and digital, so this is just another stop on its journey one might say.

One of the great things about Ticket to Ride is it only takes about 15 minutes to learn the entire game, and in this PlayLink version there is an interactive tutorial included in the app that is free to download so you can learn the rules before you even load up the game on the PS4.

Ticket to Ride is for two to five players, but unlike many PlayLink games, you can play on your own with one or more players being AI-controlled if you'd like. There are two main boards to play on in the core game; USA uses the standard rules, and France offers a slightly alternate style of play (we would recommend starting with the USA map until you've played a few games, just to get used to it before delving into the others). Gameplay can vary depending on the number of players and their level of ability, but most of the games we played took more than 30mins (but less than two hours).

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The main goal is to connect the coloured railway links between the cities on the board to complete the rail links on your designated tickets. This is done by placing the correspondingly coloured train carriages along them, and you collect your train carriages by drawing cards and holding them until you have the correct amount of the given colour. Once played, that track belongs to you and other players cannot travel along it, so you must plan your routes well. There are eight different coloured routes and therefore eight different types of card, each of which is depicted as an assortment of train carriages all from the era of steam trains, including passenger, freight, caboose, coal, and more. All of them are wonderfully illustrated, and thrown into the mix are locomotive cards that act as a wildcard and can be played as any colour.

Ticket to Ride

After the initial set up, generally you'll perform one of three actions; draw cards, play cards, and connect a route (or you can draw more destination tickets, although you don't tend to need more tickets until later in the game). The drawing phase is simple, as the first five cards of the deck are turned face up and the player can then choose to either pick one locomotive, up to two carriages, or draw blind from the deck, the idea being to build up enough train carriages to complete a route between two cities which can be played in the next turn. The board, upturned cards, and deck are displayed on both the TV screen and your mobile device, but each player has their own hand displayed on their device making for more realistic and tactical gameplay.

Each player starts with forty-five player carriages to lay down on the board as routes are taken, and play ends when a player runs out of carriage tokens and cannot complete any more routes.
Laying routes down and completing destination tickets earns you points which are added up as you play, and when it finally ends, any uncompleted tickets are subtracted from your total. The skill in the game therefore comes from balancing the greed of holding cards to complete long destinations against laying tracks to stop your opposition from reaching theirs. Really greedy players may risk collecting more destination tickets to earn more points but can get caught foul if another player lays enough track to finish the game early, which can mean big losses for the overzealous.

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Ticket to RideTicket to Ride
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Ticket to Ride is built and designed to feel like you're playing the board game, and all the wonderful illustrations on the boards and cards are faithfully recreated. Even the player carriages look like the wooden ones that you would find in the box. Added to this is an interesting selection of immersive music tracks and sound effects that really add to the board game's style, centered around the golden age of steam trains.

In a small drop-down menu there are a few game settings that we were glad to see. Options to turn off vibrations, speed up animation time, and switch between left and right handed play were all welcome additions, and you can even exit out of the game and reconnect without too much fuss, which is pretty handy when someone loses connection (this can be quite frequent in larger parties)

Asmodee Digital could have just used the standard USA board game version and this still would have been a great game, but as we said earlier there are two boards available in the core game - USA and France. The USA board covers over 30 destination cities across the United States - with longer routes being between the east and west coasts and shorter ones tending to be travelling north and south - while France on the other hand changes things up, firstly by introducing a new layout. France not only has more destinations including international ones such as Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, but it also has ferry routes. The biggest change, however, is that nearly all routes have no colours and players must assign colours to the routes as an action before laying tracks on the following turn, adding some spice to the game as other players can see where you're attempting to play a route and could steal it away from you. Ferries also need special attention, as each ferry route is depicted in grey with a locomotive on it, meaning a train has to be played alongside the correct number of carriages.

Ticket to Ride

As we mentioned earlier there are many different variations of the game, not only in terms of the style of the boards and locations but also in terms of the rules as well. For established fans of the game and those looking for more, there is a huge selection of additional boards all based on variants of the physical board games. These can be purchased separately, but big fans may want to get the First Class Pack which includes nine new maps from across the world such as the UK, Europe, Nordic countries, and Legendary Asia. Many come with new rules and gameplay mechanics to switch things up, including a stocks and shares system, technology, tunnels, and more of the aforementioned ferries.

The additional map pack may bump the price up a fair bit, but considering the core PlayLink game price is relatively low to begin with, for big board game fans (particularly those who love Ticket to Ride) we think it's a real no-brainer. While some may say that not having the tactile physical copy just isn't the same, there isn't any of the painful putting things away aspect or losing key pieces.

We had a lot of fun playing this faithful recreation of the classic board game and thanks to good tutorialisation, simple yet engaging gameplay, and the option to include up to five players, we think it's a great game to get out at parties. In fact, the only real fault we could find is that it doesn't support online play, but otherwise Ticket to Ride is a great example of how PlayLink can bring new experiences to players on PS4.

Ticket to RideTicket to Ride
08 Gamereactor UK
8 / 10
+
Good tutorial, Fun and enjoyable, Accessible, Great option when the family is over.
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No online options.
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

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Ticket to RideScore

Ticket to Ride

REVIEW. Written by Graham Bellars

"We had a lot of fun playing this faithful recreation of the classic board game."



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