Ticket To Ride

Have y'all ever heard of the board game Ticket To Ride? It looks like it would be incredibly confusing, with 240 little plastic train cars, 110 paper train car cards, 30 destination cards and 5 scoring chips, but it's super quick and easy to learn. I promise! My 7 and 9 year old both love this game, and it's a fun way to hangout together and enjoy a family game night. Ticket To Ride is for 2-5 players, as there are only 5 different colored train cars. We play with 4 people most of the time, but my husband and son like to play together after school too.

In Ticket To Ride, you have gone back in time to October 1900 in the train-era. The goal is to conquer as many railway routes as you can, connecting them to create the specific route spelled out on your destination cards (say New York to Portland or Miami to Chicago).

You start the game with plastic train cars, several destination cards (which will show the paths you will try to connect your train cars through), and  several train car cards (which show the colored paths you can place your little train car on). On your turn you can either lay down the train car cards to conquer a route, select 2 new train car cards or select from up to 3 new destination cards. There are rules to each of these, but you must do one of these on each turn. The key is,you must have the specific number of train car cards to complete a specific line (say Boston to New York, or LA to San Fran), so you want to try and gather all the train car cards you can get in your possession so you can take control of the specific routes on your destination cards.

Clear as mud? Ticket To Ride is honestly very easy to begin playing, and it is not a fast-paced, trick each other type of game. We worked together the first few times to help the kids understand their best options to build their railways. Turns out, our youngest seems to win each time we play, and does much better figuring out his own paths!

We have the original Ticket To Ride, which is the United States version, But there's also Ticket To Ride Europe, Ticket To Ride UK, Ticket To Ride India, Ticket To Ride Asia, Ticket To Ride Nordic Countries and several others.