Ticket To Ride: Italy

The Game

The Ticket to Ride: Japan expansion contains two maps, Japan and Italy. This expansion is not a standalone game and can only be played with components from the base game. 

 

Similar to the Japan map, the Italy map is longish. There are many cities in the north. Off both eastern and western coasts of the Italian peninsula there are many grey ferry routes. 

In the north there are five neighbouring countries in play. Routes connecting to these countries connect to them as a whole as opposed to connecting to specific cities. The countries are represented by their flags. Some ticket cards specify needing to connect to a specific country instead of to a city. Taking Austria as an example (in the northeast), there are two separate routes which lead to Austria. Either one may be used for completing tickets which require connecting to Austria. 

Ferry routes are partly new. Some spaces on a ferry route are marked with wave icons, and this means you must use jokers (locomotives) to claim these spaces. This is similar to the ferry routes first introduced in Ticket to Ride: Europe. In the Italy expansion, there is something more. You have ferry cards. Each ferry card is worth two wave icons. You can think of them as double jokers. However they can only be used for ferry routes, not regular routes. On your turn, one new action type is simply claiming one ferry card from a common pool. Ferry cards are always available. You may hold at most two ferry cards.  

One more new mechanism is the bonus for connected regions. Italy is divided into many small regions. If your network connects 5 or more regions, you'll get a bonus depending on how many regions are connected. If you happen to build two or more separate networks, you score them individually. This network score is not much if the number of regions is low. It only starts getting interesting around 10 connected regions (16VP). If you manage to connect 15 or more, you score 56VP! That's not easy to do though. 

Every city on the map shows the emblem of the region it is in, to make counting regions easier. 

Three of the regions in the game provide a bonus if you connect all cities within the region. Your network containing that region counts the region as two regions instead. The island of Sicily is one such region. If you connect all five cities, you treat Sicily as if it is two regions. 

 

Both the Japan and the Italy map have a pretty red air plane. 

The card at the bottom left is the ferry card, with two wave icons. The ticket cards in the top row are city-to-country tickets, one going to Monaco (not Indonesia) and the other going to Croatia. 

The Play

Compared to the Japan map, the Italy map feels more similar to the standard Ticket to Ride game. One similarity it shares with the Japan map is the long-distance tickets. My gut feel is in this map it is also worth gambling and trying to draw those long-distance tickets, and hope you are not far from completing them. This is quite exciting. 

The more outstanding game mechanism compared to other expansions is the region scoring. Often this only becomes prominent towards late game, because your network is not worth many points when it only has a handful of regions. It is possible to plan early and aim for many connected regions. So far I have not explicitly attempted that. The region scoring can be significant enough to determine win or lose, so it must not be neglected. It may be necessary to sabotage your opponents' network building to stop them from scoring too much. 

This was a 2 -player game. There wasn't much competition or tension. I (green) mainly used the ferry routes in the west, while Michelle (red) mostly stayed on land. We both had long north-south tickets but we took different paths to fulfil them. So there was little conflict. 

 

By late game, I did not have many trains left and did not dare to draw more tickets. I decided to just switch to expanding my network to connect to more regions. My tickets only required that I reach Ravenna. The tracks built past Ravenna were purely for the sake of connecting to more regions. 

 

I had connected to all five cities on Sicily island, so Sicily counted as 2 regions for me. 

 

 

This was a 4-player game, and things were much more tense compared to the 2-player game. There was more risk of getting blocked. At this point, Michelle (red) and Chen Rui (blue) seemed to need to get to the same cities. They nervously and frantically built tracks, to avoid getting blocked by each other. 

 

 

This was taken at the end of our 4-player game. I took the same approach as the previous game, utilising the ferry routes off the west coast. The routes were long, so they scored more points. Also they let me go far with fewer turns. Initially I had expected a 4-player game to be leisurely, since all routes on the map were accessible, compared to a 3-player game where double-routes would only have one half available. However the 4-player game was quite tense for us. We seemed to get into one another's ways rather easily. That was unexpected. Maybe it was because the map was narrow. 

The Thoughts

I find that Italy has the excitement of gambling and hoping to draw long-distance tickets, similar to Japan and Switzerland. It is less pronounced than Japan, since it doesn't have a shared shinkansen network which helps greatly with long-distance tickets. You need to have already built your own long distance network first. I find that this excitement comes from the fact that the map is long and thin. 

The region scoring is the most unique element of the Italy map. It is straight-forward, and it is not ground-breaking like the shinkansen, but it works. 

You can't buy Japan and Italy separately. They are in the same box. Whether you buy this expansion will likely rest on whether you like the Japan map and the shinkansen mechanism, because the Japan map is the more out-of-ordinary map. I see the Italy map as a nice bonus.