This is the game for you if you are getting back into playing board games and want to steer clear of Monopoly and all those other games your Mum and Dad made you play when you were small. Introduce your family and friends to a game so well balanced and easy to play you will come back to it again and again. If you'd like to get your kids away from the TV set and away from the video games console for a while this game would be a great place to start. The game involves trying to put your coloured trains on train tracks that match routes, which you have randomly drawn from a deck of cards. You will need to draw train and carriage cards of the right colour to claim a train route, once you have linked enough routes you will win points. The person with the most points at the end wins. You are able to block other people off from completing their route and each player has the opportunity to get revenge by doing awful things to other players route plans. It is fun, fast, easy to learn and very addictive. Go on ! Give it a try, you may find your console gathering dust for a while.

A few years back I had a locomotive based game called "Dampfross". It bored the hell out of me. But last year two good friends of mine brougth Ticket to Ride to our gaming table. And man was I in for a surprise. After Sid Meyer's Railroad Tycoon I had thought the genre had lost me completely. But Ticket to Ride is something different. Yes there is a good portion of luck in the way you have to plan your strategy as the coloured track-cards may come up as they please. But still you do have to get your plans and brains around this "problem-randomizer" in order to reach your predefined goals for this specific time of play. Yes by luck you may draw some pretty easy routes you have to build, but then again if your luck passes out on you with the coloured routes to be positioned for your track... Ticket to Ride is a game you always know what is going on with your opponents and you see their plans unfold before you and intersect with yours. It has very nice components and a look and feel that does not keep you thinking of the last millenia in terms of railroad technique...you even could think yourself to be a builder of the ECI-cross-eurasia-section. Or you just might forget its about railroads at all and just link cities...like I do. You will like that and so will your friends. Or not, if you do it better than they're...

This game is considered one of the "Holy Trinity" of gateway games, and with good reason - it has simple rules that anyone can grasp in 5 minutes and yet packs enough depth to be strategic and interesting. A perfect game to play with the family and with people who think that the board game spectrum starts and ends with Monopoly. Can't go wrong with this one!

Really fun game for the entire family, but Ticket to ride Europe is superior in my opinion, so I do not see any reason to buy this except if you are a really big fan of the franchise or if you want the expansions.

Excellent game, and totally great as it is, but overtaken by Ticket to Ride Europe as the "default" edition to own. The half sized playing cards and some not entirely well balanced destination tickets drag it down when compared to the stellar Europe edition. However, if you like the wide, open spaces and long runs, it's hard to resist. Do as I did, treat it like an expansion map, buy the 1910 expansion set for anonther 14 quid to get LOTS of new and better balanced tickets (as well as all the originals) plus a new deck of train cards, that are full sized! Bingo! Now it plays like a champion! If you are not as tragic as I am, and simply want the best value Ticket to Ride game to bust out at Xmas with the family, get thee to the Europe edition.