How to play: Ticket to Ride Europe

Ticket to Ride: Europe is a euro-style train building game for 2–5 players.

This game is essentially an alternate board version of Ticket to Ride with a few added rules. If you haven’t read my explanation of normal Ticket to Ride I recommend you do so here. I will explain everything that is different and what rules have been added.

So the first change we will address is that in Ticket to Ride (TTR) Europe there are no five train routes, normally worth 10 points, and in its place there is a single eight train route on the board worth 21 points.

The new scoring table for Ticket to Ride Europe.

The eight-length route in Ticket to Ride Europe, worth 21 points.

The next change from the original game is that there are six mission cards that have blue backgrounds. These missions are all significantly longer missions worth a lot of points. At the start of the game each player will receive one of these blue missions, distributed randomly, as one of their four starting missions of which they need to keep at least two. A player may decide to discard their blue mission at the beginning of game, choosing to not keep it as one of their starting missions, but be warned: there is no other way to get a blue mission for the rest of the game.

An example starting draw, where Brest-Petrograd is the “blue” card in this draw and worth considerably more points.

Next there are a few extra rules and aspects to the Europe version of Ticket to Ride.

You may notice on the board that there are routes between cities that have an toothed black outline. These routes are all tunnels and as such are susceptible to cave-ins when you’re building them. When you try to build them you take the top three cards of the deck and reveal them. Each card revealed that matches the color you’re using (including Engines, which are wild) adds one more card of that color to the cost of the route. Once all three are revealed, you may choose to pay the extra cost (if you are able) or you can choose to not go ahead and take all of your cards back but you pass the turn to the next person.

In this example, to play the route between Smyrna and Angora you would need four orange cards because one of the cards drawn for the tunnel was a wild.

Additionally, on some of the routes you may see an engine on one or more of the places. These routes have ferries and as such require an engine (aka wild card) for each one of the engine symbols on the route.

Each route from Dieppe to London would require at least one Engine (wild card) when playing down trains there.

Finally, there are the stations, which allow you to borrow another player’s train route at the end of the game. Each player will have three station tokens to start the game with. Each station that is not used is worth 4 points at the end of the game. Placing a station takes up your entire turn, just like every other action you can take. If you want to place a station you choose the city you want to place it on and put it down right over the city. If it is your first station placement you have to discard a card of any color. For your second placement you have to discard two cards of the same color and for your third you discard three cards of the same color. You cannot place a station on a city that already has a station on it. At the end of the game, you get to choose one opponent’s train route that connects with that city and, only for the purposes of your mission cards, you can pretend that you own that route.

In this case, red has put down a station on Danzig. At the end of the game the red player can act as though they have access to Berlin (blue train, left) or to Riga (green train, right) but not to both.

Stations allow you to bypass being blocked completely from a city or having to do a large detour because of an opponent’s placement, but they do so at a cost. As previously mentioned you get 4 points for every station at the end of the game for each station you don’t use, so placing one effectively costs you 4 points.

And, besides the difference in cities and missions due to the setting being Europe, that are main differences in rules between Ticket to Ride Europe and normal Ticket to Ride.

Brother Rating

TTR Europe, while adding some more rules and complexity to the basic TTR rules, is still a quite simple game. It plays in about the same time as normal TTR and still follows the very simple “one action per turn” style to avoid decision paralysis during your turn.

That being said, I do think that the extra rules TTR Europe adds are best handled if you already understand and have experienced normal TTR. It’s not a huge extra load of information to process but, without previous knowledge of the game it can be harder to get into it as much.

Overall, still TTR simplicity and ease of access. Brother rating: Both brothers, easily.

Fun Rating

The added complexity that TTR Europe expands upon normal TTR actually makes it a better game overall. Normal Ticket to Ride’s biggest strength was also its biggest weakness: being so simple. What TTR Europe does is make the game slightly more complex and injected more luck into the game via the cave-ins while removing some of the randomness of missions through the valuable blue mission cards. The game is still fantastically simple but the added aspects add more to keep in mind and adjust around, giving more depth to the game.

Overall Ticket to Ride Europe is just as good as if not better than normal Ticket to Ride. 10 out of 10 go pick this up if you don’t have it yet and you like Ticket to Ride.