Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails

Categories: Nautical, Trains

Mechanics: Connections, Hand Management, Network and Route Building, Open Drafting, Set Collection

Players: 2–5

Ages: 10+

Playtime: 60–120 Min

Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails takes the classic Ticket to Ride gameplay and expands it globally, introducing the element of water travel with ships, in addition to the usual trains.

As in other Ticket to Ride games, players start with tickets showing two cities, and over the course of the game, they collect colored cards to claim routes on the board using their train and ship tokens. Players score points by completing routes, but if they fail to complete a route between the two cities on their ticket, they lose points. When any player has six or fewer tokens left, the game enters its final phase, where each player takes two more turns before the game ends.

Rails & Sails introduces a few twists to the standard Ticket to Ride formula:

• Split Card Decks: There are separate decks for train cards and ship cards, with all the wild cards placed in the train deck. At the beginning of the game, three cards from each deck are revealed, and players can choose to draw from either deck.
• Train and Ship Tokens: Players choose a mix of train and ship tokens at the start. To claim a train route (rectangular spaces), players must play train cards (or wild cards) and place train tokens. For ship routes (oval spaces), players use ship cards (or wild cards) and place ship tokens. Some ship cards feature one or two ships, allowing players to cover one or two ship spaces when a double-ship card is played.
• Swapping Tokens: Players can swap train tokens for ship tokens (or vice versa) during the game, but this costs them one point for each token they swap.
• Tour Routes: Some tickets feature multi-city tour routes, requiring players to connect several cities instead of just two.

This version of Ticket to Ride adds a fun new challenge with the inclusion of ships and the global map, offering more strategic depth and variety to the classic game.