Ticket To Ride Map Collection

Set in the vast wilderness of Africa at the height of its exploration by intrepid explorers, missionaries and adventurers, Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 3 - The Heart of Africa, a single-sided expansion map for Ticket to Ride or Ticket to Ride: Europe, focuses on the central and southern "heart" of the continent displayed in a vertical format.

This expansion introduces 45 new terrain cards, divided into three different terrain types. Each type is associated with different route colors: Desert/Savanna cards for yellow, orange and red routes; Jungle/Forest cards for green, blue and purple routes; and Mountain/Cliff cards for black, white and grey routes. Players can draw terrain cards just like train cards and they may use these to double the value of the routes they claim, under certain conditions.

Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 2 - India & Switzerland presents players with two scenarios:

• India from Ian Vincent – On this game board for 2-4 players, in addition to scoring points for claiming routes and completing tickets, a player can also score points in two other ways. First, the player with the longest continuous path of trains receives a ten point bonus. Second, each player scores bonus points for connecting the cities on one or more tickets with two distinct routes. The first two such tickets earn five additional points each, and the next three earn ten points each for a maximum bonus of 40 points.

• Switzerland from Alan R. Moon – This is a reprint of Ticket to Ride: Switzerland, first published in 2007. This game board is for 2-3 players only. Instead of connecting only cities, some destination tickets connect a city to a country or one country to any of those surrounding Switzerland; a player who completes such a ticket scores the highest point value for which they qualify. Unlike most other TtR games, discarded tickets are removed from the game instead of being returned to the ticket deck. Also, Locomotives can be used only to build tunnels.

Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 4 - Nederland contains a new game board with new rules for use with Ticket to Ride or Ticket to Ride: Europe with players now creating train lines in the Netherlands.

The basics of TtR gameplay remain the same as always — players collect train cards in order to claim routes between pairs of cities with the overall goal of completing tickets they hold in hand — but Ticket to Ride: Nederland twists this gameplay in two ways. First, nearly every route on the game board is a double-route, with two tracks connecting cities. Both of these routes are in play no matter how many players are in the game.

Second, every route — whether double or single — has a bridge toll that a player must pay when building on that route. On a single route or the first track of a double route, the player pays this toll — which costs 1-4 coins — to the bank; on the second track of a double route, the player pays this toll to the player who built the first track. Players start the game with 30 coins, and if you can't pay a toll, you must take a loan card to cover the fare, with each loan costing you 5 points at the end of the game.

In addition to helping you avoid loans, coins matter because at game's end, players receive a bonus based on how many coins they hold relative to everyone else. In a five-player game, for example, the player with the most coins scores a 55 point bonus; the 2nd place player scores 35 points, and the other players 20, 10 and 0 points. If you've taken a loan, however, you're ineligible for this bonus scoring, so players have an incentive to build early and often.

These coin bonuses are balanced by the multitude of destination tickets with large point values: six of them are worth 29+ points while another seventeen are worth 17-26 points