Ticket to Ride

The guts of a computer are remote and mysterious. There's no telling what's going on down there underneath your desk. It's all crazy math, with ones and zeros invisibly opening and closing circuits and then lighting up pixels on your monitor, interpreting your keypresses and mouseclicks according to some inscrutable alchemy that decides whether your Zerg rush is countered by his Terran bunkers, whether that sniper shot from Kubra Dam will kill you, or whether you start near any iron or copper (oh please, please, please, you ghosts in the machine, please let me start near iron).

One of the reasons I like board game ports is that I know exactly why something happens. When there are relatively few playing pieces, and when they're all visible, and when it's a ruleset I might know from sitting around a table with buddies, the mystery of ones and zeroes gives way to a comfortable transparency. The ghosts in the machine have no place here.

It's worth noting that a lot of early wargaming was built around the idea of simply porting a tabletop game to an Apple or an IBM PC. But eventually guys like Gary Grigsby, Norm Koger, and John Tiller figured that you could get a lot of mileage by tapping into that remote mysterious part of a computer. Rules started retreating under the hood. Wargames were decided by the equivalent of secret backroom deals between the developer and my computer. I was on a need-to-know basis, and it was often decided that I didn't need to know.

To me, it's obscene how far wargames have gotten from their tabletop roots. Many of them are choked with detail and minutiae far below my grasp. But it's all part of the business of computer gaming, and it's how most wargames have decided to adapt. But even more graceful games with a focus on transparency still have their secrets. I can't for the life of me figure out how culture borders, diplomatic relations, and an archer's first strike are supposed to work in Civilization IV (oh please, please, please, you ghosts in the machine, let my archers save my city from those barbarians).

So there's a special place in my heart -- and on my hard drive -- for pure board game ports. There was a computer version of Advanced Civilization that stayed on my hard drive for probably five years. I would only occasionally play the AI, but I constantly had a play-by-email game going. It was clunky, and the way the turns were chopped up didn't lend itself very well to a multiplayer computer port. But so what? It was Advanced Civilization, something I could never get my friends to play. It was the same with History of the World, 5th Fleet, and various and sundry incarnations of Risk over the years. It's why I have a special fondness for little indies like War: Age of Imperialism and the port of Reiner Knizia's Samurai. Many of you revere SimTex for their Masters of Magic and Orion, but for me, they're also just as significant for being the people who reverently adapted Avalon Hill's 1830: Railroads and Robber Barons.

And that's why my affection for Ticket to Ride transcends the math at the end of this review. Call it the emotional baggage I've got after years of trying to manage Grigsby's various wars in the Pacific. But if you're not into board games, of if you've never minded the under-the-hood shenanigans of the average game, then the appeal of Ticket to Ride might be lost on you. It's a graceful faithful port of Days of Wonder's glib colorful train game.

The premise of Ticket to Ride is that you're accumulating sets of colored cards (oh please, please, please, you ghosts of chance, let this be a red card), which you then cash in to connect cities on a map. Longer routes are harder to connect and therefore worth more points. You also have a set of tickets drawn from a deck. These pay points if you connect specific cities. Once a player is out of the trains he uses the connect cities, the game ends. Points are tallied. Finis. Twenty minutes well spent. Maybe thirty or forty if you've got a lot of players, or new players.

It's a potent combination of cards, map gaming, and psychology. As a design, it's brilliantly simple and streamlined, the sort of thing you could convince your wife or daughter to play. It's among the latest breed of European boardgames, oddly popular in Germany as family fare.

This port to the computer, which is notable for being created by the same company that makes the board game, isn't without some novice mistakes. When you install the game, it unceremoniously drops itself into the program files subdirectory of your C: drive, no questions asked. There's no way to save a game in progress. Is there someone at the door? Does a child need to be put to bed? Did you just realize you're late for work? Too bad. Ticket to Ride is played in half-hour blocks or not at all. It would be perfect for running in a window, but it's full screen only, popping your desktop to 1024x768 resolution for as long as its running. It's a very DOS approach to a Windows environment.

The computer version includes both releases of the board game, one set on a North American map and another set on a map of Europe. But it also includes a brand new map of Switzerland that you won't find in print. These maps all do a great job of giving their geography character. The US is wide open long routes in the west and clustered short runs along the Eastern Seaboard, with a series of zig-zagging routes through the Midwest. Europe and Switzerland are divided into rough mountainous territory that demands tunnels and swathes of easily connected cities. In Europe, you have to use ferries in the Low Countries, across the English Channel, and around the Mediterranean.

The more you play, the more these places come alive within the context of Days of Wonder's elegant rules. The US is all about grabbing the long routes, which often upstages the concept of tickets. By introducing ferries, tunnels, and stations, the Europe map breathes new gameplay and balance into the series. And the Swiss map has international connections that give you different options for how to play your tickets. Switzerland also eliminates stations, which I always had a hard time wrapping my brain around (oh please, please, please, you ghosts of game rules, let this station connect Frankfurt and Berlin). All along, the developers have built in new complexity without compromising the design's elegance. I'll be curious whether they can maintain this in the next iteration of the board game, Marklin, which adds tokens for moving around passengers and goods. To my ears, that sounds like so much busywork, but Days of Wonder has certainly earned the benefit of the doubt.

The actual implementations of the boards are great. You interact with the pieces by just selecting cards with your mouse. All the information you need is clearly displayed with only a few minor exceptions (you can't, for instance, see how many cards another player has once he's got more than eight in his hand). But for the most part, all the clarity of the board game is intact. There are some cute touches, like the period avatars with parasols and top hats, or the sound effect of a failed tunnel attempt. Oh, the humiliation! The background music consists of tasteful parlor music that---believe it or not---you might actually leave turned on.

There are some great tutorials that'll teach you the basics, and the bots will get you up to speed. But beyond that, the value of Ticket to Ride is almost entirely in the multiplayer. As a single player game, which is presumably one of the reasons you're spending $30 on this computer game ($20 if you have a serial number from one of the board games), Ticket to Ride doesn't go very far. The AI is good for practice, but it's rote, unimaginative, and predictably rigid. Once you figure out the basics, you'll have to try pretty hard to lose against these bots. This isn't too surprising, since a lot of the game is psychology, balancing the twin demands of earning points with making guesses about the best ways to keep the other guys from earning points. This sort of thinking is hard to do in an AI, but not impossible. I'm reminded against of SimTex's 1830, which made similar demands on the AI. SimTex rose to the occasion.

So like many board game ports, Ticket to Ride doesn't really hold up except as a multiplayer game. There's a thriving and friendly community with games constantly available, even at odd hours of the night considering its popularity in Germany. There's even a ranking system to track your progress and prowess. Unlike many games, it's entirely possible to beat people who are far better than you, so you shouldn't have any trepidation about jumping online. What's more, a game is never over until it's over. It's an almost perfect design to ensure that all players will want to see a match through to the finish. This is partly because they're short, but also because the ticket system means point totals change dramatically once the game ends.

But since Ticket to Ride is mainly a multiplayer game, it's worth noting that you don't need the CD version of the game to play. You might as well just buy a “web card" to allow you to play online using the downloadable Java applet (which integrates seamlessly with the CD game, which is also written in Java). Web cards cost $18 for a year, or $12 for six months. What you're getting for your $30 when you order the CD game from Days of Wonder's web site are the bots and the Switzerland map.

It's also worth noting that the CD version of the game will effectively expire after a year, so you'll have to buy a “web card" if you want to continue playing. Furthermore, there's no option for LAN games or hotseat games with a single copy. Yeah, I know, it's kind of silly to talk about playing a computer port of a board game with a bunch of people sitting around the same house. But Days of Wonder clearly wants you to buy the board games instead of just using your $30 computer game instead. And to further muddy the waters of transaction, you can join an online game for free. Presumably you could buy a web card for $18 and have your buddies on a LAN set up accounts to join your hosted game. Or maybe even launch separate browsers on one desktop! What tangled webs we weave trying to save a few bucks.