This is one of my most played games, largely because I can get everyone in my family to play it. The board is a map of Europe stretching from Edinburgh to Erzurum, which has train routes in different colours linking the different cities. It is a very cool map, very 1800’s in style, with cities like Venezia, Warszawa and Bucuresti, so it is full of flavour.

The objective is to complete train routes to score points, to that end you start the game with several train tickets that might specify Berlin – Moskva or London – Wien for example. There is a deck of carriage cards that are coloured in red, white, black and so on, so over the course of the game you collect carriage cards, and then might discard three red cards or four white cards to lay a train route on the map.

The cards you lay are defined by the map, as Paris to Frankfurt is either three white cards or three orange cards for example. There are also grey routes, on which you can discard a set of cards of the same colour in order to complete that route. When you complete a route you place plastic Train Cars on the route from your supply, and every player starts with 45 Train Cars.

On your turn you can either draw cards or lay a route, so your choices are limited and turns can pass very quickly, especially in a three player game if all the players know what they are doing. Ticket to Ride Europe has some tweaks, in that some routes are also tunnels, so that when you try to complete a tunnel there is a chance that you will need spare cards of the same colour in your hand to complete it.

The carriage cards include a special card called the ‘loco’ or ‘locomotive’, which is a wild card that you can discard as any colour. Many of the routes require you to lay a loco as part of the route, and these are effectively ferries, like Palermo to Smyrna route. The locos are fairly rare and are really useful, and also essential if your train tickets have routes passing through the southern area of the map.

So at the start of the game you end up looking at your train tickets trying to work out where the cities on the map are, and it can be quite confusing. Then you try and sort out a strategy of what routes to complete first, and whether to discard any of the train tickets, so long as you keep at least one. During the early stages of the game you generally draw cards on most of your turns in order to collect sets of cards in the same colour to give you plenty of options during the latter part of the game.

When one or more players start laying routes on the map it can cause a panic as the other players worry about having their routes closed off to them. When a route is blocked it means you have to take a round about route in order to complete your train ticket. The other option is to lay a plastic train station on a city, in order to ‘borrow’ another player’s route from one city to another, so that you can link up two or your own routes. With five players this can occur quite frequently.

Ticket to Ride has several versions, including Nordic Countries, USA, Switzerland and Germany, all with their own little nuances and special rules. The Europe version has ‘long’ and ‘short’ train tickets, the long ones score higher points and are more awkward to complete. Players that are familiar with the tickets will find it easier to impede other players if they work out which long tickets they are trying to complete.

I have found that most groups that I play Ticket to Ride with are not directly confrontational however, but it definitely becomes a different kind of game if the players are deliberately aggressive in play. This is important because you score points at the end of the game for train tickets whose routes you manage to complete, but are also deducted points for any train tickets whose routes you fail to complete.

The trick with aggressive play is to lay routes on nexus points of the map, often requiring a single carriage card, so that you waste as little of your own resources as possible. If you concentrate too much on hindering other players your points score can suffer, but if you take only a few train tickets and lay lots of fairly large routes you can complete your tickets early on and then start to block your opponents.

Ticket to Ride Europe has enough strategy to keep you involved for an hour. It is ideal as the kind of game you can play while chit chatting and socialising, but still works if you knuckle down and treat it as a serious competitive game. The components are excellent, being chunky, colourful and easy to handle, and the rule book is clear and concise. This is a great casual game.