Ticket To Ride: Japan

The Game

I have been eagerly anticipating the Japan expansion map. The most eye-catching element of this expansion is the shinkansen trains (bullet train). This is a unique game component. The Japan expansion is not a complete game and needs components from the base game or Ticket To Ride: Europe. The game board is double sided, one side being Japan, and the other being Italy. The Italy map has its own unique game mechanisms too.

This is the full Japan map. There are two insets. The first one is Kyushu, one of the four main islands of the Japanese isles. It is the southernmost island. The second inset is the Tokyo subway. The map of Japan is just too long, and has to be presented this way. Hokkaido, the northernmost island, is barely shown.

The Tokyo station in this Tokyo subway map is the same as the Tokyo station on the main map. When you connect to the Tokyo station here, you are considered to be also connected to the one on the main map. This mini Tokyo subway map is much simpler than the one in real-life below.

The real Tokyo subway map.

The station connecting Kyushu and the main map is Kokura, at the northeastern tip of Kyushu.

This red airplane reminds me of the Miyazaki Hayao anime movie Porco Rosso / Crimson Pig.

The unique mechanism introduced in the Japan expansion is the shinkansen (bullet train). The grey tracks in the photo above with shinkansen icons are the shinkansen routes, and once built, anyone may use them. Building a shinkansen route is just like building any grey route. You must play cards of a single colour, but they can be of any colour you like. Unlike normal routes, you don't place your own trains onto the tracks. Instead you place a single shinkansen train onto the track marked with the shinkansen icon, to indicate that this route has been built, and any player may use it for the purpose of completing tickets. You don't score points for building a shinkansen route. However you do keep track of how many cards you have contributed towards the shinkansen. Player contributions are compared at game end, and they are rewarded or penalised based on their rankings.

When playing the Japan map, you only have 20 trains of your player colour, compared to 45 trains in the standard game. There are only 16 shinkansen trains, which are shared by all players, since anyone may build a shinkansen route. The game ends differently. You enter the final round when one player has two or fewer trains and there are two or fewer shinkansen trains left. Both conditions must be met.

This track is for keeping record of each player's contribution towards shinkansen routes. You count each card spent. At game end, players gain or lose points based on their relative positions on this track. In the case of ties, both players enjoy the same higher reward. E.g. both players tied for 2nd place score the points for being in 2nd place. The next player gets the penalty for being in 4th place.

These are the rewards and penalties you get for your contribution towards the shinkansen. Taking the 5-player game as an example, the biggest contributor scores 25VP, and the lowest contributor loses 10VP. If you don't contribute at all, you lose 20VP. There really is no excuse not to contribute. Some shinkansen routes are very short and thus easy to build. 

The card art for the Japan map is more modern compared to other Ticket To Ride expansions. Usually the artwork is based on trains from the steam era. In most Ticket To Ride games, the ticket value is based on the number of trains needed to connect the two cities by taking the shortest possible path. This no longer holds true on the Japan map, because of the shinkansen mechanism. The shinkansen helps tremendously in completing long distance tickets, so long distance tickets are not worth as many points as you would expect if this were a typical map.

The Play

Let's talk about the shinkansen first. There is area majority competition in this new game mechanism, because everyone is competing for the limited number of shinkansen trains and trying to be the biggest contributor. Contribution is relative. You only need to be one notch higher than the next person. Being far ahead is wasteful, since only the relative positions matter. There are only 16 shinkansen trains. If everyone fights for them, they will run out very quickly. The shinkansen mechanism creates an internal conflict. On one hand you want to compete to be the biggest contributor, but on the other hand you hope not to help your opponents too much when you build shinkansen routes. You prefer to benefit from others' efforts.

The number of shinkansen routes on the board is more than 16. Once the shinkansen trains are exhausted, the remaining shinkansen routes become normal grey routes. When you build these tracks, you will claim them using your own trains. This also means you monopolise that route and it cannot be used by other players. In our game I used this to break the shinkansen network into two. We had a long uninterrupted shinkansen line from Kyushu in the south all the way to Hokkaido in the north, except for just one stretch in the middle. We had run out of shinkansen trains to build that. I intentionally left it unbuilt because others were extending the shinkansen elsewhere. Once shinkansen trains ran out, I quickly claimed that remaining stretch with my own trains, so that I became the only player who could access the whole network. Others only had access to the northern half or the southern half. If they wanted full access, they would need to build an alternative route to link up northern and southern half with their own trains.

Due to the shinkansen, many long distance tickets are easy to complete. Drawing tickets is lucrative. You want to gamble on drawing long distance and high-scoring tickets which you can easily complete using the help of the shinkansen. This lucky draw feeling is wonderful. It makes the game more luck-heavy, but I am fine with that. The Switzerland map also encourages players to draw tickets, and I like it because of this. 

 

In our game, the construction of the shinkansen network started from three different spots - the far north, the far south and that one short route near the middle right next to Tokyo. 

 

Chen Rui (blue) took an unusual approach when she worked on the Tokyo subway. In this photo she had build three separate routes, none of them connected. It was as if she didn't care whether anyone blocked her. It would have been easy to sabotage her network building by claiming the routes which would link up her network. We did a 3-player game, so only one half of the double routes were available. Getting blocked was a serious risk. Later on we found out that some of her tickets really were that short, and she actually didn't need to link everything up. She had one Shinjuku-Ikebukuro ticket which could be completed by claiming just that one route at the top left. Okay, she knew what she was doing. 

 

Michelle (red) and I (green) competed to be top contributor of the shinkansen. Chen Rui (blue) gave up quite early. She had many Tokyo subway tickets and didn't need the shinkansen as much.

 

The shinkansen looks impressive. 

This was the end of our game. We had built a shinkansen route all the way from the southern tip of Kyushu to Sapporo in Hokkaido, except for that one small stretch next to Tokyo which was claimed by me (green). Trains of the player colours were scattered and disjointed. Many of our tickets were helped by the shinkansen, and we only needed to build short last-mile stretches from a shinkansen station to a smaller city.

The Thoughts

Ticket To Ride: Japan is quite different, but I must admit I decided to buy it simply because it's Japan, well before I knew how the shinkansen works. If you are a fan of the series and enjoy something out of the ordinary, then this certainly is worth checking out. The shinkansen works for me, but what I like most about it is actually how it makes drawing tickets lucrative and exciting. I get a kick out of that. I think on the Japan map it is harder to get blocked, due to how helpful the shinkansen is.