2007.10.15

Ticket to Ride: Switzerland

Posted in Board Games at 8:30 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel

This weekend I got my hands on the new Switzerland expansion for the popular Days of Wonder game Ticket to Ride. The expansion consists of a new board and new tickets, along with the rules.

Jason and I played two two-player games as a “test run”, and overall we both really enjoyed them. There are three big differences in this game as compared to the previous games in the series:

  1. You only get 40 trains instead of 45. This might not seem like a huge change, but it adds considerably to the tension. Wasting turns is not an option in this game.
  2. You can pick up 2 face-up locomotives, but locomotives can only be used to build tunnels. Sometimes locomotives will still just sit there if nobody wants to build tunnels. It’s also somewhat frustrating to have a number of locomotives in hand that are completely useless since you don’t need to build a tunnel.
  3. Tickets, tickets, tickets! I won the first game by a large margin, gaining about 60 points from tickets. The second game Jason and I were both more aggressive and had 10 tickets each (all of which were completed). I got about 80 points from this, while Jason managed to get well over 100 points from tickets alone, winning very handily with 190+ points. This is the highest score I have ever seen in any Ticket to Ride game.

I have not yet tried the game with three, but I imagine it would also be great.

There is one big oversight in the game, though. The rules for the expansion do not include the number of points you score for claiming routes of the various lengths. If you own the original Ticket to Ride, this is not a problem since the rules for that game cover the scoring. If (like me) you only own Ticket to Ride: Europe, this becomes a problem because it has no routes of length five, and so the rules don’t mention what you would score in that case.

For the record, it’s 10 points. A quick trip to the web to look at the rules to the original game answered the question.

But, if anyone at Days of Wonder is reading this, why didn’t you at least include a scoring quick-reference card with the expansion, or an extra glossy sheet? The incremental cost would have been miniscule, and you would be saving people like me a bit of frustration.

The bottom line: If you like Ticket to Ride but want to crank up the tension in your two-player games, this is definitely the game for you. Or, if you like to push your luck by making “just one more ticket draw”, this is also the game for you.