Ticket to Ride: Europe - Tips & Strategies

If you have already memorized all routes (long and short ones) and looking for something new – try this house rule:

at the start of the game after everyone chooses which tickets are they going to play with, place 2-5 more (depending on the number of players) tickets face up next to the map. These are tickets for everyone. So, if you’re the one who finishes it first – it’s yours.

This way everyone starts to compete with each other because no one wants for someone else to get those tickets without a fair fight.

There are two routes that I always try to claim first(of course when my tickets are in this area:
Kharkov-Rostov
Berlin-Wien
Those two are build with green cards and if you want to have them build them first. Especially in a 4 or 5 player game. Going through alternative routes will be way more expensive and will slow you considerably.

I find it beneficial to try for lots of shorter/medium routes instead of focusing on long routes. The long routes score high, but can take longer to finish. By the end of the game a lot of short and medium routes can add up to many more points than a few longer ones.

I have found that there are two ways to simplify the game for first time players:

* Do not allow discarding and drawing of route tickets. While it makes it more random whether players have complementary or non-complementary routes, it removes an experienced player’s advantage of knowing whether a combination is achievable or not.

* Removing the special rules for tunnels and simply playing tunnels as normal routes.

My favorite strategy when playing Ticket to Ride is to plan my routes so that they line up, but with a triangle shape. So, if I”m trying to connect England to Spain, I’ll connect Spain to Russia and then to England. This gets me a much longer single route (possibly netting 10 points) and gives me lots of work-arounds. Plus, when you build in England, then Spain, then Russia as your first three builds, people don’t know where you are going, and some start to panic right at the beginning. Its a lot of fun 🙂

This is kind of a dirty trick but let’s face it, there aren’t that many long route cards and after a few games you probably will have seen them all. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out which distant areas of the map your opponents possess. Once you do, you can build up tracks to block their paths between cities forcing them to take a longer route around or to use one of their stations.

Somewhere within my first 10 turns, usually whenever I can’t use the face-up cards, I draw tickets. I draw lots of tickets, and by drawing them before I have a lot established, I have a better chance to connecting them all in one line. This has the benefit of both getting an extra 10 points if I have the longest route, but also being a very efficient way to use my trains.

Normally if you take a train card from the row, you cannot then take a wild card. This is because a wild card counts as two draws. However, our house rule is that if your first draw gets replaced from the deck by a wild card, then you automatically receive the wild card as your second card.

Try to line the routes up.
Once you have lined them you must stick to it until you have finished them in order to pick new routes.
Another important thing is to observe where are the critical lines on your routes.
Because when your are playing with 3 players or less you must pick them first or this will cost all your strategy. If you´re playing with 4 or more then you have to keep watch those lines who can only pass one train and take them as soon as you can in order to complete your route.
And don´t be afraid to loose your turn to pick up new routes. You may be rewarded with routes that are already accomplished. But be careful! ALWAYS keep an eye on the amount of wagons remaining in your friend´s hand. Don´t pick up new objectives that you won´t be time to accomplish. 😉

Ticket To Ride, like many games, requires players to collect and group cards of the same color to play and score. So after a game, the cards are likely to be sorted in small groups of the same color. Ticket to ride has LOTS of cards, and shuffling them by hand is work. I purchased an inexpensive, battery operated card shuffler on the table during gaming sessions. In just seconds, the cards are scrambled for the next round of play.
If the games you play involve collecting sets of like cards, a card shuffler will help keep you playing instead of shuffling. I got an inexpensive one on Amazon, and it is on the table whenever the games I am playing involve cards. It works well, and it helps insure random cards draws.