Ticket To Ride: London

The Game

I'm a minor collector of the Ticket To Ride series. My wife Michelle likes the series. I don't own all the expansions, but I have more than enough to occupy us. Currently there are two short versions, Ticket To Ride: New York and Ticket To Ride: London. They have smaller maps, fewer trains, and they take a shorter time to play. They work well for newbies. The full Ticket To Ride game is already a newbie-friendly game. These shorter versions work just as well, within a shorter time.

Box cover on the left, rulebook on the right. The rulebook is designed to look like a travel brochure, which is nice.

The box insert is well designed. The player colours are red, blue, white and purple. Red, blue and white are colours of the UK flag.

Instead of trains, you get London double decker buses. Each player gets only 17 buses, compared to 45 trains in the original game. That's less than half!

The full map. The score track along the edges is made of bus tickets.

The two columns on the left are the train cards (called transportation cards in this version). The joker is the iconic double decker. My favourite is the yellow submarine. The traditional black cab is a nice touch too.

The rightmost column is the ticket cards. The basic gameplay is similar to standard Ticket To Ride. However at the start of the game, you draw two instead of three tickets, and you must keep at least one. During play, if you decide to draw tickets, you also draw two, and you must also keep at least one.

I like the decorations on the board, like this Sherlock Hotel room key near the Baker Street station.

The longest route on the map is 4-trains (to be precise, 4-buses). The route point values are the same as standard Ticket To Ride.

The main reason I bought Ticket To Ride: London is Michelle used to study and live in London, near Elephant & Castle.

The stations on the London map are numbered. This is related to a new mechanism. If you connect all stations of the same number, you get to score bonus points of that value. There are three blue stations on the board with the number 3. If I connect Waterloo to Globe Theatre, and also Globe Theatre to Elephant & Castle, at game end I will score 3VP. There is no longer any 10VP bonus for the player with the longest route. This is one difference from the standard game.

The Play

The 2-player game is a little loose and easy. Less chances of getting into each other's way. Workable, but I think the game is better with more than two.

You only have 17 buses, and that is an important consideration. At the start of the game when you draw those two tickets, you may find it impossible to fulfil both of them, because you'd need more than 17 buses. There is a feeling of danger in London because of this. During play, if you draw tickets and find yourself unable to fulfil either one, you are royally screwed. If you are low on buses, you really must think twice before drawing tickets.

I (white) had completed one long ticket. I didn't have many buses left, and decided to use them to connect those #2 and #3 stations for the station bonuses.

Coincidentally every time Michelle played, she (red) connected to the Elephant & Castle station.

There are only two #1 stations on the board, and they are only one bus apart, thus easy to connect. Still, 1VP is VP.

Shee Yun and Chen Rui played with us. We did a full 4-player game. The 4-player game was more exciting because we easily got into one another's way.

If you are forced to reroute on the London map, you are in big trouble. Sometimes it's a death sentence, because you may not have enough buses left. In this game, elder daughter Shee Yun intentionally blocked Michelle. Michelle was only one 1-bus route away from getting to where she wanted to go, and Shee Yun placed a bus to block her. As a result Michelle had to reroute, needing to spend 5 buses instead. 5 buses out of a total of 17 is a big deal.

In this photo you can see a 1-bus route with two possible connections, pink and black. It's between a green 2 and a black 1 station. That was one route I needed for completing one of my tickets. I collected a black train card so that I could claim that route. Before I did so, Chen Rui announced that she would be claiming that route. She was going to use a joker for it, and she asked whether anyone at the table needed specifically the pink part or the black part of the route, because if anyone needed one of them, she was willing to take the other one so as not to block him/her. That was mighty considerate of her. I didn't want to say anything. I didn't want to take advantage of that. I let her randomly decide. Unfortunately for me, she picked black, which was what I needed. I didn't manage to get a pink card in time before the game ended. I couldn't complete my ticket and was penalised.

From this you can see the difference in behaviour of the children. Shee Yun is more competitive, while Chen Rui is more laid back.

With 4 players, the board gets crowded. Michelle needed to go from Waterloo to Big Ben, and because Shee Yun blocked her, she had to take a detour via Elephant & Castle.

The Thoughts

Before playing the game, I expected it to be super simple and nothing serious. Now that I have played it, I found it to be different from what I expected. Yes, it is shorter, but there are still strategic considerations. I find it somewhat more exciting than Ticket To Ride. You only have 17 buses. It is as if you are playing the crucial and climactic final quarter of a tight Ticket To Ride game. Any mistake can cost you the game. Ticket To Ride: London has a sense of urgency which makes regular Ticket To Ride feel leisurely in comparison. I had expected Ticket To Ride: London to be inferior (sorry), but that's not the case at all. It's not a dumbed down, simpler version. It's a condensed and tighter version.