The Best Ticket to Ride Strategies

Ticket to Ride is a great game, in fact, I think it’s one of the best. It does a fantastic job of appealing to board game hobbyists and casual gamers alike. The rules are simple to pick up and it’s satisfying to build something overtime. At the end of the game you look at the routes you’ve built and can only smile. While it’s fun just to play the game, competitive players also find it even better to win. So here begs the question: What are the Best Ticket to Ride Strategies?

Table of Contents

• The Ticket Tiger
• Ticket to Ride Blocking Strategy
• Quick-fire Building
• Longer Single Routes
• Game specific mechanics
• Conclusion

The Ticket Tiger

The aim of the game is to get the most points. The foremost way you’ll do this is by completing the routes on tickets that you draw at the beginning of the game. Using Europe as an example, your ticket may have London to Rome on it. As the game goes on you’ll start building trains along this route and you will be imposing your influence/presence on the board.

At some point you will complete all your routes. Or even slightly before this point if you’re confident in your route-planning. Here’s the time to pick up more routes. The likelihood is that you will have already completed some of these newly picked routes at least partially. And then like the roots of a tree you need to slowly add some extra pieces to the board.

There are of course risks associated with this. While completed tickets give you points, tickets left unfulfilled take away points; this will be discussed in a later strategy. Therefore, the ticket tiger strategy is best used in unison with a long route. Barcelona to Moscow is a great example. By using a long route, it’s more likely that the secondary routes you pick up will fall somewhere along this path.

Ticket to Ride Blocking Strategy

So, we’ve established that ticket = points. This can be positive or negative. Completed tickets give you points, incomplete tickets take deduct points. Well, the same can be said for our opponents. So, how can we stop them from completing their routes?

There are several ways. First, we can place pieces on predetermined choke points. In Ticket to Ride Europe it would be between Kharkov and Rostov. For America it is less effective, but Los Angeles to Las Vegas would work too. So, why are these good pressure points? Using the Europe example, Kharkov to Rostov cuts off the entire east side of the board from its upper and lower half. Players that have tickets from the south east corner to the north east corner will need to waste a lot of cards completing their routes. The cards they are wasting is time for you to capitalize and complete your routes.

Predetermining where you want to cut off your opponent is a bit of a 50/50. There’s a chance they don’t even need to use that route and then you waste your cards instead. A better way is to anticipate your opponent’s route. This is harder because you need some experience in the edition you’re playing. Once you know vaguely what routes you can expect your opponents to have you can cut them off half way through the game. Then they’ll need to circumnavigate your route or, in the worst scenario (for them), give up the route completely.

Quick-fire Building

The Quick-fire building methods can be devastating depending on your opponent’s playstyle. Some players are drawn to the long routes in the ticket to ride games as they give the most possible point on the ticket. This strategy is the ticket tiger’s worst enemy.

The aim of the quick-fire builder is to finish the game as early as possible with the aim of preventing their opponents finishing their tickets. The first step of this strategy is picking the shortest possible routes for your hand. Routes between 2-6 points are recommended and if any of your routes overlap, even better. When you’ve placed all your routes (ideally 4-5 turns earlier than everyone else), you can start using as many cards in your hands as possible. Aim for train lines 4 and above as the longer routes are worth more than shorter routes, for example, a route of 4 trains is worth more than 2 routes of 2.

It doesn’t matter where you place these routes, we are no longer trying to fulfil any tickets. Ideally we will be utilizing pressure points as discussed earlier, but the number 1 aim is to get down to 2 or fewer train pieces triggering the final turn for other players. This strategy often leads to visible frustration in other players and so you’ll know quite quickly if it’s worked.

Longer Single Routes

Above we established that the points gained for longer routes grows exponentially. At the high end an 8 long train route is worth 21 points, 4 routes of 2 long is worth 8 points. So for the same number of trains we have 13 points difference.

We’re aiming here to horde as many of the same colour card as possible to try and take on these long routes. We recommend keeping as many wild cards as possible and also drawing from the table as often as you can. While you can only draw 1 card instead of 2 from the table, it’s comforting to know you will be picking the right card.

The recommendation is try to ensure that the tickets you take at the beginning can be used with a long route. Therefore you’re using your pieces as effectively as possible.

In some versions of the game you get 10 extra bonus points for the longest continuous run of trains. This strategy can also build into that.

Game specific mechanics

Some of the games just have broken mechanics. Ticket to Ride: Rails and Sails is a good example of this. This game introduces the harbour mechanic, where you get between 20-40 points, for not really doing much. They’re easier to place than routes and only need an already established route to the port. Take as much advantage as you can of specific games mechanics.

Ticket to Ride: The Heart of Africa has a similar point abusing mechanic. By placing the terrain cards under certain conditions you can double the value of one of your routes. If you combine this with the longer single routes it can be game winning.

Conclusion

Today we’ve named some of the best Ticket to Ride strategies. Try a couple and see which you enjoy most. The best strategies are the ones that are a combination of those named above, plus a little bit of flair from your own playstyle. When you gain more experience, you’ll know what’s the best strategy to use in any given situation. Good luck!