Ticket to Ride: The Dice Expansion
Days of Wonder
Fall 2008
Designed By: Alan R. Moon
# of Players: 2 - 5 players
Playing Time: 30-50 Minutes
Age: 8+
ICv2 Stars: 3 out of 5
For Days of Wonder, Alan Moon’s Ticket to Ride is the gift that keeps on giving. This year alone has seen the release of the Ticket to Ride Card Game and Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries. Ticket to Ride: The Dice Expansion is not a stand-alone game, but a way to change up any of the TtR games by replacing the train cards with dice.
Instead of drawing and collecting the train cards needed to build track, players roll a set of special dice each turn. The dice have single tracks, double tracks, stations an a wild locomotive There are also single and double track tokens, which can be saved and applied to future rolls.
Each turn the player rolls the five train dice. They can re-roll as many dice as they wish one time. At that point they may use the dice results to build. A single track for single tracks, or the double tracks. These can be combined with track tokens accumulated on a previous turn. Any two unused dice can be used to get a track token.
The expansion is a clever way to add the dice rolling element without having to alter the game too much. It also works with any version of the board game, which is nice. Overall I enjoyed it, the game speeds up as it becomes possible to build on every turn, but not likely, many routes need help from the train track tokens to have a reasonable chance to complete them. We seemed to experience a bit of a hiccup when we played with three, as the double tracks all got built and double tracks became useless in the game, so I enjoyed this for all numbers but recommend it for four or more players in particular.
-
