Review

Product: Ticket to Ride: The Card Game is meant for two to four players, ages 8 and older. Inside are 96 train cards, six Big Cities Bonus cards, 46 Destination Tickets and a full-color rules book. The game is available in 10 languages, including Spanish, French, German and English.

Ticket to Ride: The Card Game is very easy to play, but not so easy to master. To win the game, players collect sets of illustrated train cards that are used to complete Destination Tickets and score bonus points by winning Big Cities Bonus cards. However, points for uncompleted Destination Tickets are deducted from a player's point total at the end of the game.

To start, each player is dealt one wild card, seven cards out of the shuffled train deck and six Destination Tickets. Players secretly choose which tickets they want to keep and return the others to the deck. The top five cards are then drawn from the train deck and placed face up in a row, creating the draw area.

Each player's turn consists of two phases. First, he moves train cards out of his railyard into his on-the-track-stack. Next, he can perform one of three actions: draw new train cards, place train cards in his railyard or draw Destination Tickets.

Destination Tickets are color coded, telling players what sort of cards they need in their on-the-track-stack to fulfill that particular ticket and score points. Players put train cards in their railyard by playing three different colored cards or a suit of two or more cards of a single color. Once cards are on the track, they are flipped over and cannot be looked at until scoring.

A particularly nasty and sometimes devastating tactic players can use is "train robbing." If a player can place more of a particular suit of cards than another player, that player's cards are removed from play. Drawing new Destination Tickets can be a double-edged sword, possibly putting more tickets in your hand than you have train cards to complete. However, you can keep all, some or none of the cards you draw. Still, once you choose to keep the tickets, you have to live with your decision.

Two- and three-player games last until the draw deck is depleted. There is some ambiguity as to what this means. Does play end when the deck runs out or when the last of the cards from the draw area is taken? In our games, we've played with the latter interpretation. At that time, each player, including the player who took the last card, gets one more turn.

Then everyone tries to fulfill their tickets with the cards in their on-the-track-stacks by matching the appropriate colors. Once all the fulfilled tickets are verified, points are tallied for completed tickets, deducted for uncompleted tickets and bonus cards handed out.

A four-player game goes through the deck twice, with an initial round of scoring after it runs out the first time. The final tally, including deductions, comes once the deck is depleted a second time.