Ticket to Ride plus Asia Map Expansion #1
Teams:
- Yellow: President Gamer and Shutter
- Blue: Clumsy Ninja and Space Cat
- Green: Chubby Unicorn and The Professor
This Ticket to Ride expansion adds an interesting new element of game play: teams. Each team is given two card holders, and each team member receives 27 trains, 4 train cards, and 5 destination tickets. The card holder is for the cards the team members will share. All other cards are to be kept secret, and players are instructed to not talk strategy during the game. Each team member begins by choosing at least three of the five destination tickets, and places just one on a card holder. As in the original rules, players can either place trains or draw train cards, but a third option is now available. Players can share their other two destination cards with their team by placing them on the card holder. This takes up the player’s entire turn. When a player draws train cards, she draws them one at a time (unless she takes two of the same color from the visible cards). She has to decide if the first card will go in her hand, or on the card holder. Seems simple enough.
Teams slow this game down a bit. In the regular game, turns are usually very quick, but now you have to consider what your teammate needs and will do. Your teammate took a green train card and a yellow train card. There’s now another yellow card available, should you take it and put it in the card holder? You’re planning to put down four black trains, but your partner just took two black trains, are they looking at playing in the same spot? It’s also really hard not to discuss strategy. One of the teams did a lot of gesturing and mmhmm-ing, which didn’t work out as well as they hoped. At one point President Gamer placed trains and Shutter asked, “Why’d you do that?!?” Also with teams you can get cut off from your destination very quickly. Teammates play one right after the other, so if they both place trains, you may be taking the long way. This happened to Professor and me on our way to one of our cities. Thankfully, we didn’t have to go too far out of our way to get there.
Midgame
Despite the fact that Professor and I were the only team to complete all our destination tickets, Clumsy Ninja and Space Cat won. I think this was because we had a lot of short stretches of track, while they had long stretches gaining them more points during the game. Something to consider when choosing destination tickets.
During the final scoring we learned that, like in math class, it’s important to show your work. There was some confusion as to how the final scores were reached, specifically in regards to the destination tickets that failed. We had to back track a little to make sure those points were deducted from scores and not just left out.
Winner: Clumsy Ninja and Space Cat
Final Score