Ticket to Ride

Ticket to Ride

Ticket to Ride is one of those games that is just tailor-made for an online upgrade. The core mechanics are easy to translate to a few button presses, and the most annoying parts of the game - scorekeeping and setup - are taken care of. In Ticket to Ride, you play trains on various routes through the US, the goal being to have the most points, either through route length alone or by completing Destination tickets. But you need colored train cards to be able to claim routes, which you have to draw off the deck or from a public pool. When one player's trains are gone, the game ends and scores are tallied.

There's a ton of strategy to be had playing against humans, and the AI is sufficiently dastardly without being Madden-AI cheap. The graphics are not the best they could be, as they're maximized for HD televisions, making the 70% of us still playing on SD TVs have to strain our eyes to read the text on some of the smaller graphics and cards. There are a few animations of zeppelins coasting across the country and such, but nothing distracting, no bright colors or flashing anything.The sounds are clean and crisp, but there is no music whatsoever; you'll have to plug your iPod into the XBox during marathon TtR sessions to keep yourself aurally stimulated.

Perhaps most miraculously of all, Ticket to Ride has managed to hang on to its online community, despite its fractions paid Downloadable Content and atrocious lobby system that forces you to back almost out to the main menu to change the maps you're searching for. It really is a testament to the amount of fun to be had "playing trains with friends."

Controls are fairly intuitive, with just the right amount of redundancy controls- not too much to slow down play, not too few so that you accidentally do something wrong. Without a turn time limit, though, you're free to go your own pace and make sure everything's set up the way you like it. With 2 different DLC maps already released for this game and local multiplayer offered, it's a sure buy, since there's so many different ways to play- online, local and single-player. And if that doesn't convince you, consider this: The actual cardboard-map game, available in stores, runs $40. At 800 points, this game is the best steal of the year.

Graphics: Bare-bones and unobtrusive. Gets the job done with no frills. 2
Sound: Spare tinkling glasses on a diner car and player-piano tunes occasionally show up. 1.
Controls: Intuitive and exacting, no deep sub-menus, just crisp cursors and button selection. 4.
Tilt: The value of this game is in the fact that it is superior in every way to its tabletop ancestor, but a foreigner to the game might be daunted by the advanced strategy. 4.
Overall (not an average): 4