So, a couple of weeks ago I visited a local Sunday marketing and picked up Ticket to Ride Europe for just $25 bucks!
I had played it once before and really enjoyed it so bought it and got my daughters to play.
Some initial thoughts
- Inside box packaging is a bit flimsy but pretty common
- The cards were stuck together, luckily none tore. Not sure if this was an issue with production or if this box has been sitting for a while (not sure on which edition/print run it was)
- We picked up a possible typo – We had Red train cards but no red tracks. We had dark grey/black tracks but no dark grey/black cards. Assumption is its a mistake as could not find anything about this in the manual. The manual had these same colours which is really odd that no one picked it up?
Likes – from me and my daughters (12 and 16)
- We all had a lot of fun
- My 12-year-old was leading most of the game until my eldest and I were able to complete some bigger tracks and tied for first place, beating her by just 2 points. I liked the feeling that we could come up from 30 points back to catchup – that feels very balanced in a game as many have the issue once you are far ahead, no one can catch you which can make it boring for the rest of the players. Not the case here.
- Manual was fairly easy to understand if a bit wordy and was small and lightweight.
Dislikes:
- Felt it took nearly 2 hours to play with 3 of us which I don’t know, felt too long in my opinion.
- We never bought additional destination cards – I had 2 destinations left, my daughters completed all of theirs.
- The sticky cards meant it took a few “run throughs” of the deck to properly shuffle them.
- The folded board seemed to “bubble” errr… not sit flat… even though we were on a flat surface.
- The Red cards and Black Tracks mentioned above
Scoring
- Re-playability -8/10. With the different destination cards I think one could easily play this multiple times and often too. Although I wouldn’t play it more than once a month myself.
- Quality of Product – 6/10. With the colour mistakes and feeling of the flimsy inner packaging, I think this could be done better. Some stalls at the marketplace was selling this for $40 which with our experience, I would say probably not worth it.
- Experience Needed/Difficulty – 8/10 (thats a good score!) I think this is an easy one for even younger players to pick up. You could also drop the number of plastic trains to 20 and drop the long destination cards to make faster games. Possibly allowing one of the actions to let you take another plastic train.
- Fun – 9/10. I Fully think myself and my daughters had lots of fun playing this.
