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Ticket to Ride Marklin Edition is the third in Alan R. Moon's wonderful Ticket to Ride series, a group of games that I have yet to find anyone that doesn't enjoy and want to play more of after their first game.
Through out the TTR series of games, your task is to build train routes between various cities on the board, which in TTR:M is a wonderfully colourful map of Germany. To build your routes you will need to collect carriage cards in the particular colour (or Locomotive wild cards) needed to join cities that are close to each other (each card has a different picture of one of Marklin Model Railway company's beautifully detailed model trains, hence the games name). Several of these city to city links will be required to make your overall route.
The routes them selves are divided into two types for the TTR:M edition, Short Routes (worth from 5-11 points if completed or negative 5-11 if uncompleted) and then long routes (worth 12-22 if completed or negative 12-22 if unfinished). At the start of the game each player selects a variety of four route cards from the 2 route card decks and are obliged to keep at least 2 of these but may keep all 4. The problem with keeping all of the routes is that if they are uncompleted by the end of the game (which occurs when one player has one or no trains left) the total points from that route is deducted from your overall score.
The major difference between TTR:M and the original game is the inclusion of Passengers and Cargo tokens. When a player plays cards to connect two cities, they may choose to place one of their three passengers in either of the two cities connected to. Later the player can then move their passenger along their own route of trains collecting cargo tokens from each city they pass through. To increase the length of the route the passenger passes through, you may also play a passenger card for each section of your opponents track you wish to pass through. This really adds depth and complexity to the game, offering 2 distinct strategies, you can either go for the long routes which offer more points but give less cities to pass through, thus less opportunity to utilise the passengers, or you could go for the shorter routes and use more passengers (which could also be beneficial in obtaining the bonus 10 points at the end of the game for completing the most routes).
Ticket to Tide is my favorite of the series, offering more depth and strategy than the original, however I have also played it several times with new or younger players and have left out the passengers to keep things more like the original, and therefore easier to learn.
If you are only going to pick up one Ticket to Ride game, make it Marklin.
Rating:  [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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