She's got a Ticket to Ride (Marklin)

We have a new featured boardgame, and it’s Ticket to Ride: Marklin, the newest in Alan Moon’s easy to play, difficult to master train series. Why did I select it as a featured game? Tickets and Passengers!

For those not familiar with the series, Ticket to Ride is a set of boardgames that involve a similar central play mechanism, but with different maps, and each one in the series has a few rules twists. Marklin (which is a map of Germany and features a brand of popular toy trains) is my favorite so far. The central mechanism remains the same- you’re trying to collect sets of colored trains to lay your trains out onto the map so as to complete your Tickets. Your tickets show a start and end destination that you’re trying to get a continuous line connecting one to the other. If you complete the line by the end of the game, you get bonus points. Miss it, and lose points.

Marklin has improved the way tickets go out. There are two decks: long routes, and short routes, and you initially get four to select from. (If you want to get more tickets throughout the game, you also get four to select from on your turn.) This is a big improvement from previous games, where ticket drawing was a lot more luck based. It was really easy to draw tickets that would bite you later while others get lucky tickets. I think the way the tickets are balanced, and the ability to select from 4 instead of 2, is a huge improvement from previous versions.

Marklin also features a new mechanic: passengers. On each city is a score marker. When you place a set of trains, you can place your passenger on either end of the line you just placed. On your turn, your passenger can ride your line, picking up any score markers along the way. Timing is crucial, though- the score markers depreciate after someone has riden over them, and after a while, stop scoring completely. Special passenger cards in the deck also let you use other people’s tracks to make an even longer trip.

I found both changes to be very simple and elegant changes that add a lot to the game. Every time I’ve played, the timing of when to have your passengers ride the rails has been critical, with one player running his on the same turn that two other players wanted to run theirs! The changes to tickets add to the game as well. There is still a strong luck element, but it’s much less painful to draw tickets that are all over the place.

The downsides? It’s still slightly more complex than the original, and the German map is a lot harder to wrap your head around than the American map (for us Americans, at least.) While there is a new kind of wild card, the old kind of wild cards are still in there, and still have all sorts of fiddly rules about their use. Plus, they interact with passenger cards in a weird way, as either one can clog up the drafting area, leaving everyone with few choices unless someone takes the bullet and takes an unappealing card.

Overall, Ticket to Ride Marklin is my preferred of the games. While the original may be the easiest gateway for new players, Marklin will be the one that I tell everyone to buy.