Tabulating the Tricolour

The very latest entry in the Ticket to Ride franchise is Ticket to Ride: Paris. Like those other Ticket to Ride games, it is another card-drawing, route-claiming board game based around transport links and like those other Ticket to Ride games, it uses the same mechanics. Thus the players will draw Transportation cards and then use them to claim Routes and by claiming Routes, link the two locations marked on Destination Tickets, the aim being to gain as many points as possible by claiming Routes and completing Destination Tickets, whilst avoiding losing by failing to complete Destination Tickets. Yet rather than being another big box game like the original Ticket to Ride, Ticket to Ride: Europe, or Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries, it takes its cue from Ticket to Ride: New York, Ticket to Ride: London, Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam, Ticket to Ride: San Francisco, and Ticket to Ride: Berlin. Part of the ‘City’ series for Ticket to Ride, it is thus a smaller game designed for fewer players with a shorter playing time, a game based around a city rather than a country or a continent. The entries in the series are also notably different in terms of theme and period.

Published by Days of Wonder and designed for play by two to four players, aged eight and up, Ticket to Ride: Paris is easy to learn, can be played out of the box in five minutes, and played through in less than twenty minutes. As with the other entries in the Ticket to Ride ‘City’ series, Ticket to Ride: Paris sees the players race across the city attempting to connect its various tourist hotspots. All of entries in the ‘City’ series are both set in their respective period times and have a theme representative of their city. Thus, Ticket to Ride: New York had the players racing across Manhattan in the nineteen fifties via taxis; Ticket to Ride: London had the players racing across London in the nineteen sixties aboard the classic double-decker buses; Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam took the series back to the seventeenth century and had the players fulfilling Contracts by delivering goods across the Dutch port by horse and cart and claiming Merchandise Bonus if they take the right route; Ticket to Ride: San Francisco continued the lack of trains in the series by having the players travel around ‘The City by the Bay’ aboard its icon form of transportation—the cable car and in Ticket to Ride: Berlin, the series goes across the ‘Grey City’, either by the trams that crisscross the city or the underground which encircles it—or both! And all in the nineteen sixties. Ticket to Ride: Paris takes the players back to the ‘City of Lights’ during the Roaring Twenties, along the Avenue des Champs-Élysées after a visit to Le Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile and the Tour Eiffel—and they can find the Tricolour, they will be able to celebrate Fête nationale française, or Bastille Day.

Inside the small box can be found a small rectangular board which depicts the centre of Paris, from Père Lachaise Cemetery in the east to the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile and the Tour Eiffel in the west, and from Montmartre in the north to Montparnasse in the south.In between are numerous routes, none of them, notably, longer than three sections long. This means that a player will score no more than four points per route claimed. The scoring track, from zero to forty-nine, runs around the edge of the board and overall, the board has an art deco feel to it. Besides the board map, the box contains sixty Buses, fifteen in each colour—red, blue, white, and green, forty-six Transportation cards, twenty Destination Ticket cards, four Scoring Markers, and the rules leaflet. The Bus pieces are nicely sculpted and come in the standard colours for Ticket to Ride, but are illustrated with a different form of transport for each colour. So black is illustrated with a motor car, white with a river cruise boat (presumably along the Seine), yellow with a tram, purple with a delivery van, orange with a Métro carriage, and the wild card with a bus. This really makes the cards stand out and easier to view for anyone who suffers from colour blindness and the range of transport options give the game a greener feel. Similarly, the Destination Tickets are bright, colourful, and easy to read. Most score either four, five, or six points upon completion and the most that any one card will score is eight points. As expected, the rules leaflet is clearly written, easy to understand, and the opening pages show how to set up the game. It can be read through in mere minutes and play started all but immediately.

Play in Ticket to Ride: Paris is the same as standard Ticket to Ride. Each player starts the game with some Destination Tickets and some Transportation cards. On his turn, a player can take one of three actions. Either draw two Transportation cards; draw two Destination Tickets and either keep one or two, but must keep one; or claim a route between two connected Locations. To claim a route, a player must expend a number of cards equal to its length, either matching the colour of the route or a mix of matching colour cards and the multi-coloured cards, which essentially act as wild cards. Unlike many Ticket to Ride variants, the map for Ticket to Ride: Paris has no black routes and more importantly, it has no grey routes, which means that Transportation cards in the correct colour or wildcards, or a combination of the two, have to be played to claim any route.

The other difference between Ticket to Ride: Paris and other Ticket to Ride variants is that it introduces a new means of scoring points, a distinctly French means of scoring points. When a player claims a red, white, or blue Route, he can keep one of the Transportation cards that he played, except if the card played was a multi-coloured wild card or he already has a Transportation card of that colour. The Transportation card kept is placed in front of the player, face up. At the end of a player’s turn, if he has one red, one white, and one blue Transportation card in front of him, he has created the Tricolour and can celebrate Bastille Day. This scores him four points. All three cards are discarded and the player can start claiming red, white, or blue routes on subsequent turns.

However, the number of red, white, and blue routes are not equal. There are eleven white, twelve blue, and thirteen red. Both the red and the blue routes are one space in length, whilst the white routes are two spaces long. So, the former are going to be easier to claim than the latter, and white Transportation cards are a more important resource than the other colours because there are fewer routes of their colour. That said, Ticket to Ride: Paris cannot simply be won by creating the Tricolour again and again. Essentially, celebrating Bastille Day and scoring points in this way is a bonus.

Physically, Ticket to Ride: Paris is very nicely produced. Everything is produced to the high standard you would expect for a Ticket to Ride game.

As with other entries in the ‘City’ series for Ticket to Ride series, Ticket to Ride: Paris offers all of the play of Ticket to Ride in a smaller, faster playing version, that is easy to learn and easy to transport. This is one of the easiest entries in the ‘City’ series to learn and play, with the Tricolour scoring mechanic similarly being one of the easiest to learn and play. Plus it does not require any other components, such as extra tokens or multiple types of playing pieces. Of course, along with the world famous locations on the map board, the Tricolour scoring mechanic are what enforce the Parisian and the French theme of Ticket to Ride: Paris. Overall, Ticket to Ride: Paris has a Gallic simplicity that makes it a decent introduction to the ‘City’ series for Ticket to Ride and Ticket to Ride in general.