Ticket to Ride Pocket - Tips & Strategies

This one is difficult because you need to punch a great deal of tickets without leaving very many unfinished.

Opponent(s)
Just choose one opponent: Marg –When it gets towards the end of the game she will, more often than not, just end up drawing cards from the draw pile until there aren’t any left. This will allow you to more time to draw routes at the end of the game to complete this achievement.

Route Selection
The ‘shape’ of your route should resemble a right-handed checkmark. Starting with Vancouver and going south all the way to LA, then to Phx-Santa Fe-Den-KC-StL-Chi-Pitt-NY-Bos-Mont. Many routes in the Mega variant will be along this line and you will have 10 trains left to make spurs off of it.

Bottom Line
In my game, I had spurs that connected to Las Vegas, Nashville, and Atlanta. I completed 26 out of 27 tickets and scored 405.

Once you get the route, start drawing tickets. The one main thing you need to consider is where your spurs are going to be. If you are drawing a lot of Atlanta tickets, then that’s where you’ll have to go. And be careful of how many trains you have left. Remember, if you get down to 2, you only have one more turn left to place trains or draw tickets!

Tickets connecting to Miami might not be viable for this one. I never tried it. There is a good deal of luck involved when drawing tickets. You only draw three at a time and must pick at least one. Sometimes, you can get stuck with three tickets that go North-South and don’t match your route at all. This can wreck your score badly.

There were about a half a dozen times where I thought I had enough, only to come up short. I think you should really consider getting to completing at least 25 before finally trying to end it. Good luck!

These achievements are both very similar, so I’ll include them both in one strategy.

Opponent(s)
One opponent: Marg –She may claim some of the same routes you need to before you get to, but you need to choose her because she gets hung up at the end of the game and just draws cards until there are almost none left. Often, you’ll be able to see where she is going and try and take the black/orange routes near where she is going.

Ticket Selection
All Black
Start with anything from the base route of LA-El Paso-Santa Fe-Denver-KC-St. Louis-Chi-Pitt-NY and you should be able to complete many of the tickets in either the standard or any of the variants. From NY I then connected to Montreal-Sault St. Marie-Duluth-Winnipeg. This also almost assures you the Longest Route bonus ticket, which you may need.
All Orange
Pretty similar to the all black one, but you may need to choose ones that begin in San Fran or Las Vegas instead, though you could still choose ones from LA as its only 2 from Vegas.
Both
Long route selections may actually make this one tougher. You may find it easier to achieve them by choosing shorter routes that don’t take as many turns to complete, as you’ll see below. The All Black took much longer than the All Orange one for me, and I think it’s because I chose shorter routes. Though I can’t really be sure, I may just have been luckier in my draws.

Bottom Line
Your problem, and it’s a big one, is how many tickets of the specific color you need in order to claim all of the routes of that color…while still winning! There are 12 each of the black/orange and 14 locomotives (wild), and statistically you will only see about half of each the first time drawing through the deck.

Picking which of the routes first is important and should be, I think, the same ones: Denver-KC and Chi-Pitt. Both of these routes are right in the middle of almost everything and are therefore likely to be taken very early. Once you’ve secured them, try and make out where your opponent is going and determine if it’s near any of the other routes you need. After picking the most common and ones near my opponent, I would then try and claim the biggest routes, saving the smallest ones for last because it would be very near the end of the game and I would need to pick fewer cards to claim them.

Picking a good time to claim your off-color routes can be a little tricky as well. I usually did this when the initial draw deck was close to being exhausted. There usually weren’t any more of the train cards you needed and I felt it was best to wait until the draw deck was exhausted and the discards were reshuffled into a new draw pile. Not to sound like a total numbers geek, but it would mean that there was a higher ratio of your cards to other colors, so that you could start to draw up again and have a better chance of drawing the color you need.

Unless you draw extremely well in what color you need, you will almost certainly exhaust that draw pile a second time and have to recycle the discards. This is good news…but also bad news. The good: most of the cards that are left are of the color that you need. The bad: the game is very close to being over, if it isn’t already.

There’s a lot of pressure at the end of these two achievements because it almost feels like you’re racing against a clock in order to get all of the routes, which I did enjoy, despite how frustrating it could be at times. There were many times where the opponent just decided to end the game right before I was able to claim the last route I needed, and there were more than a few where I thought I had completed it, only to discover after the scoring was done, that I had missed one of the routes somehow!

For me, it was a toss-up between the All Black and the All 5 Route achievements for most difficult. Perhaps the most frustrating part about the All Black/Orange achievements is that you often get very far towards completing it, but your plans can be dashed at the last second, ruining your whole game and forcing you to start all over again. I confess that I made some crude hand gestures at the screen and used some off-color language at times. I apologize if any of you were offended. 😉

If you can finish a good long route, especially through the center, start stockpiling route tickets. Only keep the ones that you can grab quickly as a branch off your main route. It’s harder to get the longest route this way, but easier to complete multiple routes and grab enough extra points to make up for that lost 10.

When you are playing against the bots, especially against the bots, you need to get on those routes as soon as you can. Short routes like ALT to NASH you better get right away. Longer routes, if you try to sit on your cards and keep drawing, the bots will take more often then a human player. When you got it, get it, or you will lose it.

There is nothing better than getting your hands on a couple routes that overlap nicely. Then make a point to pick nothing but other routes that either overlap with the original route or easily tack on to one end or the other. This is a quick way to ensure you get the longest route… as long as you don’t let anyone cut you off!