Games That Don't Suck: Ticket to Ride

(For a list of games in this series, click here and scroll down.)

Of the board games reviewed here thus far, Ticket to Ride (TTR, for short) has come closest to entering the mainstream, to the extent of having appeared on television. (Granted, the show in question was The IT Crowd). This does not surprise me. TTR is easy to learn, plays quickly, includes a bit of luck, allows both individual and player-vs.-player strategic decisions, and – unlike Monopoly and other "mainstream" games – is non-language-dependent. I have played many online games of TTR with European players, and have taught the game to Chinese and Korean students and scholars.

The premise of TTR is that the players are early-20^th-century travelers and tycoons, trying to claim railroad routes so that they may complete journeys ("tickets") from one city to another. Each player begins with two or three tickets to complete and may acquire more during the game. Routes between cities consist of between one and six colored or grey spaces; some cities, particularly major rail centers, have two parallel rail routes connecting them. To complete a route, a player must collect and play a number of train cards equal to the number of spaces in the route. The cards must all match the color of the route, unless the route is grey, in which case they need only be of one individual color (all red, all blue, etc.) Once a player claims a route, s/he marks it with his/her railroad-car pieces; thereafter, no other player may claim that route.* One of the strategic elements of the game is the ability of players to block one another's routes. Players must keep this in mind as they decide whether to wait and claim longer (and more valuable) routes, or seize shorter routes in order to complete their tickets before someone else blocks them.

On a player's turn, s/he may perform one of three actions: 1) draw up to two cards from the train card supply, 2) claim a route on the board, or 3) acquire new destination tickets.  Claiming a route is straightforward enough (see the previous paragraph), as long as one has acquired enough train cards of the appropriate color. The train card supply has two sections: an open layout where five cars are displayed for all players to see, and a face-down draw pile. Players may take two cars from either the open layout or the draw pile (or both). Some train cards are actually locomotives, and these are wild: each counts as one train card of any color. A locomotive costs two cards if it is in the face-up layout, but only one if a player blind-draws it from the face-down draw pile. 

As one takes train cards from the face-up layout, one replaces them from the draw pile. This may be very useful to a player trying to accumulate train cards of a particular color, but may be even more useful to that player's opponents!

A player may also, on his/her turn, acquire new destination tickets.  If s/he chooses to do so, the player draws three tickets from the ticket pile, and must keep at least one of them, though s/he can choose to keep two or all three. Tickets are worth between 4 and 22 points (depending on the distance between the cities on the ticket), but they are a liability until they are completed: each uncompleted ticket costs the player its face value in points at the end of the game.

Players earn points in two additional ways: 1) by claiming routes, and 2) by having the longest continuous route at the end of the game. Routes are worth an ascending number of points depending on their length, ranging from 1 point for a one-car route to 15 points for six-car routes. The longest-route bonus is worth 10 points; in my experience it is usually only important as a tie-breaker between two evenly-matched players. It does introduce another strategic decision into the game: should a player create a single long route to claim the bonus, and perhaps end the game before the other players can finish their tickets, or construct several web-like train routes in order to complete the most tickets?

Players begin the game with 45 train-car pieces with which to claim routes.  Once a player is down to two (or fewer) pieces, all players all are allowed one more turn, and then the game ends. Whoever has the most points wins the game, and all the honors that they may prudently claim.

While I occasionally grow tired of Ticket to Ride, it is usually only after I have played the game several dozen times. Half as many plays of Risk or Monopoly would leave me wanting to chew off my own leg to escape. I may safely say, therefore, that TTR is an easy-to-learn game with ample strategy and a high replay value – and, if you grow tired of playing with your friends and family, versions are available for play online, on your PC, or on your iOS device. (There are also several non-U.S. variants of Ticket to Ride, using new regional boards and new rules, for those tired of the 1900 U.S. map.)


* Unless it is a double-track route in a four-person game.

Games That Don't Suck: Alhambra

(For a list of games in this series, click here and scroll down.)

Alhambra, the name given to the 14th-century palace of the sultans of Grenada, is also one of the best tile-laying games available. It is additionally the name of a brand of beer, which is nearly enough to justify for it an entry in this series.

In Alhambra, each player constructs his or her own version of the famous Grenadan palace, using square tiles representing the complex's various features – gardens, arcades, towers, and so forth. Each tile has a purchase cost and a color that determines its value in victory points. Some also have thick black lines, or walls, that may increase the tile's final point value but also make it harder to place in one's palace. One acquires palace tiles by purchasing them from a small mat, the “market,” with four stalls, each identified with to a particular color (ostensibly the nationality of that tile's builders, but that isn't important). Each tile can only be purchased with currency of the color corresponding to its market stall. Players can overpay for a particular tile, but if they pay its exact value they get an extra action. Managing one's money, which all players obtain from a common pool, is one of several tasks players of Alhambra must undertake while playing.

On his or her turn, each player may draw money cards from the bank – at least one card, and more than one if their total value is 5 or less – buy a palace tile from the appropriate market stall, or redesign their palace. “Redesigning” sounds complicated, but isn't; when a player buys a tile, he or she must either add it immediately to their palace, or place it in their “reserve,” where it earns no points. Players with reserve tiles can then add them to their palace, or swap them for existing palace tiles, as a redesign action.

Adding tiles to one's palace is the most important part of the game, since it determines how many victory points one scores. Players must position their newly-added palace tiles orthogonally to existing palace tiles – that is, the new tile must share at least one side with an old tile. (Players each start with one 0-point tile, the Fountain of the Lions, already in play.) Some palace tiles have walls on one or more of their sides; these inhibit palace construction but can also score extra points for the player. In placing a tile with a wall, a player must be able to trace an orthogonal line from the new tile to an old tile that is not blocked by a wall. (The rulebook explains that a “visitor” to your Alhambra must be able to walk from tile to tile without going outside or running into a wall.) Walls make building more challenging, but players do earn points for their longest continuous wall at the end of the game.

The game begins with two scoring cards sorted into the money-card deck (the deck from which the bank is replenished); when each of them turns up, players initiate the first and second scoring rounds. The third scoring round occurs when there are insufficient unpurchased palace tiles to replenish the tile market – that's also the end of the game. In each scoring round players earn points determined by 1) the different colors of tiles they have in their palace, and, more importantly 2) whether they have more of that color in play than anyone else. In scoring round 1, the player with the most tiles of a particular color earns points for it; in round 2, both the player with the most and the player with the second-most tiles of a given color earn points (more for the first-place winner), and at game's end points are given to the top three tile-builders of each particular color. The players congratulate the person with the most overall points, drink a pint or two of Alhambra beer, and then wait for Ferdinand and Isabella to show up and demand their surrender.

Like Dominion, Alhambra is a simple game with a little luck (the money cards and tiles appear randomly, though in large enough groups to permit choice) and a lot of decision-making. There are money-management decisions: players need to choose which currency cards to take from the bank and whether to save up low-denomination money for exact purchases or spend what they have before other players buy the tiles they want. They must make design decisions: should they maximize the interior area of their palace or focus on building the longest walls? They must also keep track of the architectural “horse-race” between players, who are competing to have the most tiles of each particular color, particularly the more valuable colors, in their Alhambra. If the game has a flaw, it lies in the thinness of its “skin:” while Alhambra is allegedly set in 14th-century Spain, there is very little about the game's mechanics that is reminiscent of that setting (and the artwork, while pretty, is somewhat abstract). If you want a game to carry you away to a different time or place, like Middle Earth or the European Theater of World War Two (or the Middle-Earth Theater of WWII), this isn't the best choice. Otherwise, though, this is a quick, easy-to-learn game with a lot of depth, and a good introduction to a game mechanic (tile-building) with which most people are unfamiliar.

Illustrations, top to bottom: a sample game of Alhambra, courtesy of Martin Sommerfeld; extreme close-up of an 8-point green tile; recommended post-game refreshment.

Not a Disney Princess

Hiero's Journey, Chapter Four:

For a chapter-by-chapter index to this series, click here.
(For the previous installment in this series, look no further than here.)

Hiero and his companions finally reach the Inland Sea, whose waters are plied by merchants and pirates, and whose shores are adorned, here and there, with the radioactive ruins of old "First Strike targets" (75), still deadly 5,000 years after the final war. The sea is also, Hiero observes, home to a variety of mutant critters: huge four-footed amphibious grazers that resemble hippopotami; huge flying fish big enough to eat the grazers; and giant gulls with 30-foot wingspans, perhaps large enough to eat the flying fish.  The giant gulls may explain why the Unclean Evil Mutants don't use gliders in this area.  Or maybe Lanier thought we'd had enough of evil gliders for now.

Hiero is looking rather unheroic when he reaches the sea: matted hair and beard, "now stiff with filth" (76), and dirty clothes.  The party stops to wash; Gorm goes whuffling into the water, while Hiero helps Klootz clean his antlers.  In an aside, Lanier tells us the two have been together since "the great annual calf roundup six years ago" (81).  If there's ever a TV show called "Cute Overload: Post-Apocalyptic Mutant Edition," we know what's going to be on the first episode.

In addition to pirates and merchants, the Inland Sea is apparently also home to primitive screwheads (to borrow a term from Army of Darkness), for shortly after reaching the lakes Hiero foils the attempted sacrifice of a captive princess by barbarian savages.  The sacrificial victim was bound by a long cord to a stake, and was being savaged by the giant gulls (whom she was trying to fend off) while the barbarians and their kilted, drum-beating priests looked on.  We later discover that the woman's name is Luchare, and that she is in fact a teenage princess, a runaway from a far-off kingdom called D'alwah (likely near the old river or state) whose inhabitants live in walled cities, keep slaves of their own, and make war on one another.  Hiero finds this rather barbaric at the time, but he expresses no regrets about having rode in and rescued Luchare from the savages who have tied her up.

Did I mention that Luchare is African-American, and that the savages who were in the process of sacrificing her have white skin and blonde hair – an "archaic human stock," the biracial Hiero calls them (85)?  I suspect Lanier initially devised the rescue scene while recalling Conan stories or bad old movies, then decided to subvert the inherent racial stereotypes by inverting the captors' and captives' races.  It also appears that Hiero doesn't really care about racial differences, except to note that blonde white people are rare in his experience, and to indicate (by carefully describing Luchare's hair, skin, and facial features, rather than simply giving her a racial label) that he's never seen someone of African descent before but thinks that Luchare is more "normal"-looking than her captors.  I suppose, though, that if you've just been interacting with humanoid animal mutants and evil psychic specters who dissolve into putrid slime, human differences seem rather minor.

We might also note another authorial deviation from stereotype: Luchare, while very young, isn't a vaporous fainting damsel, but rather a fairly competent fighter, well-muscled and able to defend herself.  She takes a spear to help defend the party when then run into a canoe full of Blonde Barbarians some distance down the shore – apparently, the kilted priests had a mild case of telepathy and were able to summon reinforcements – though she doesn't get a chance to use it.  Instead, Hiero orders Klootz to submerge and swim under the canoe, then re-emerge from beneath and smash the vessel (and its passengers) to pieces.  Take that, honkies!

Coming next: Luchare recounts her own journey, from the walled medieval cities of future Delaware to the mutant-infested ports of future Indiana.

Games That Don't Suck: Dominion

(For a list of games in this series, click here and scroll down.)

Dominion, the first recommendation in this series, is a quick card game with a medieval theme, but no overtly fantastic elements. There are no dragons or sparkly unicorns here (there is a Witch, but that's all). The players are land-owning nobility in an unspecified kingdom, trying to amass the largest number of valuable lands before the game ends. Lands are green cards that give a specified number of points (from 1 to 5) but have no other real value. One buys lands with money cards, which one acquires during the game by purchasing them with smaller money cards. (Buying money is one of Dominion's only counter-intuitive features.) The game also provides action cards, which allow players to increase their number of purchases per turn, draw new cards, discard less useful cards in their hand, or make life difficult for (i.e., attack) other players. Action cards are illustrated with and named after a person or place – a Village, a Throne Room, a Militia company – which sometimes relates to their game function and sometimes merely adds character to the game.

Dominion's central mechanic is called deck-building, which is not unique to this game, although it's one of the first non-collectible card games (as opposed to collectible card games, like It's Tragic, This Gathering) to do it well. Each player starts with a deck of ten fairly weak cards (Copper coins and 1-point Estates), from which s/he draws a hand of five cards. Each turn players play some or all of the cards from their hand, using the played cards to activate actions and buy new cards. They then discard any unused cards and draw five new cards from their deck. When they exhaust their individual decks, players shuffle their used cards together with anything they've purchased (action cards, new money cards, new lands) to form a new deck, from which they draw subsequent hands. Gradually the players build up larger decks - hence, "deck-building game" - with more action cards, more valuable money cards, and more valuable lands. The game ends when all of the most valuable land cards (Provinces) have been purchased, or when the players have bought all of three other kinds of cards (excluding money cards, which rarely run out). This takes anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes; experienced players can breeze through a couple of games in an hour.

This seems too simple to be fun, but Dominion has just enough randomness, a fair amount of strategy, and a lot of replay value.  The randomness comes from the reshuffling of each player's deck every time it runs out of cards.  The strategy derives from the five-card limit imposed on each player's hand every turn; players generally want either to limit their acquisitions of, or eliminate, less valuable cards, or buy action cards (like the Cellar) that let them discard useless cards. Players can play attack cards, forcing their adversaries to discard cards or give them to the attacker (among other possibilities). The game's high replay value stems from the large number of action cards available: 25 of them, of which only ten can be used in a given game. Some games will therefore have lots of attack cards and player conflict, some will require players to focus on building up their money supply, some will allow players to draw and play larger hands.

To sum up: Dominion is easy to learn, has only a few mildly counter-intuitive rules, can be played in under an hour, mixes a lot of luck with a fair amount of strategy, and is different every time you play it. What's not to like?

1.      This is not a game for those who despise medieval settings, though there are virtually no “fantasy” elements in the game, and the setting doesn't affect game play. (No one has to say “Huzzah!”)

2.      One can play the basic game with as few as two people, but only four at most can play.

3.      It's expensive: $45, as opposed to $20 for Monopoly. However, Dominion has more replay value than The Thing From Parker Brothers, and a lot less Associated Bitterness.

Finally, here, via Boardgamegeek.com, is a short account of a Dominion game I played a couple of years ago.

 (Thanks to Able Gamer First Class Susi Livingston for assistance with this piece.)

Addendum, 20 April 2016: CPO Gamer Ben McFarlane notes that land cards are actually worth 1-6 points (Provinces are 6-point cards). Much obliged for the clarification. And in my note on MTG I should have noted that Magic isn't a deck-building game. Indeed, it isn't a game at all. It is, in fact, an opioid.