The Year We Railed, I

While battling through Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, I received word that a Ticket to Ride legacy game was on its way. I pre-ordered as soon as I could, as I wanted to get this for Christmas for my dearest wife. She had been starved of Ticket to Ride for years and I hoped after a year of unending, ruthless Pandemic, the family might be interested in playing something else – anything else.

When Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West arrived, it was the biggest damn box I’d ever seen, bigger than Pandemic: Season 1 which had previously laid claim to being the biggest damn box I’d ever seen.

But was everybody ready for another legacy title so quickly after our tough experience with Pandemic Legacy: Season 1?

Let’s be clear. There will be spoilers. I expect this will be a short series in three parts and won’t be exploring the games blow-by-blow. This episode covers the first four games in the campaign.

The biggest damn box I’d ever seen contained a lot.

Most of these treasures were sealed for now. But let me cover what the basic TtR:LotW game entails; the skeleton of TtR:LotW is vanilla Ticket to Ride with some long term foibles.

TICKET TO GUIDE

It’s Ticket to Ride, alright. Players receive a number of trains, which will increase with every year, to build routes between cities on the map. Each turn, they can pick up train cards or build routes; to build, they must have a set of train cards that matches the colour and length of the route to build it. Only one person can build a particular route. The Ticket to Ride classic locomotive rainbow wildcards are here as well.

Each player starts with $5 and scoring in TtR:LotW is measured in hard cash. You’ll spend or earn greenbacks throughout the game, often through events. Newspapers cards are shuffled into the train deck and whenever a newspaper is revealed, an event must be drawn. Sometimes the effect is instantaneous, other times the event lingers. For example, there’s an event which declares you get $2 every time you build a white route.

Players also have tickets that show two cities. Players will gain cash for every ticket they build routes between – and lose it for every incomplete ticket. The game ends when one player gets down to two trains or less, at which point every player gets one final turn.

But whereas Ticket to Ride normally scores points for every route built, which always turned the end game score verification into a bit of a score chore, train building itself earns no score. That’s not entirely true because, unusually for Ticket to Ride, players will make $2 for every route built on a track matching their train colour.

Still, there’s no point building a long five-train route for the cash value because there is no cash value. Instead, you will get a bonus awarded on the number of trains remaining which ranges from $weet FA to $16 for having zero for trains. The final score each year is the sum of your train bonus, ticket values and cash in hand. The largest score wins.

The scores are going to be compiled at the end of the campaign to find out the winner, but the designers have gone to lengths to ensure no one knows if there’s a runaway winner. Each banknote is slotted into your “vault” which you will only open when the campaign is finished. Other bonuses you earn along the way will also be saved in your vault so, unless you’re taking explicit notes, it will become impossible to know who is on top.

1: 1865, PUNCH IT

TtR:LotW is a legacy game and that means some sort of legacy deck that informs of rules changes as the campaign goes on. This is the story deck because it’s telling a story, which we all forgot really quickly. Looks like railroad tycoon Robert Reeves has been murdered by Mama O’Connell, who is a bad person, so the railway is now up for grabs. The players are different companies now expanding into the vacuum left by Reeves. The cards keep on hinting that Mama is playing her own game, but she is little more than a narrative trick at the start.

We noticed all sorts of icons that have no relevance right now. Cities on the coast have anchor symbols. Some train cards have pickaxes. One icon that does have influence right now is the green large city symbol. If you build a route from a large city, you get a bonus train card! I was a bit slow off the latrine on this one: my son realised you can turbo charge your deployment speed if you focus your efforts around large cities. The trouble is, most of these large cities are down the East Coast. Once you head inland, it all gets a little Smallville.

But with lots of short routes, a compact map and just 20 trains apiece, the first game was over in about an hour. The story deck then asked us to open “the conductor’s toolbox” and inside was…

…a ticket hole puncher!

The tickets have all these spots down the side which are punched when a ticket is completed. If tickets are punched by the same player enough times, the tickets are permanently retired from the game. It will soon turn out this isn’t a mechanic restricted to tickets – several other bonuses turn up later, which use the ticket punch to retire them after a number of uses.

There was a slight awkwardness here because the story deck check happens after the ticket retiring step in the order of the rules – but for this first month, you do it late because the rule is added by the story deck.

Now, some tickets retire immediately and reward you with a postcard which is usually a secret sidequest. I got one in the first month which said I’d receive a bonus if I made at least $16 in a game. The postcard goals are hidden just like the tickets.

But I find the postcards aggravating. The postcard deck is quite thick and I would describe them as an indexed secret deck. If postcard 143 is referenced, for example, you have to look through the pile for postcard 143. Naturally, the postcards are sorted in order, but you have to be careful looking through them not to get spoilered by accident. Postcards, you see, are not just sidequests but also additional rules that get summoned as the campaign moves forward, like the top secret dossier in Pandemic Legacy: Season 1.

There are a lot of compartments to store the cards in the box, with card separators like ‘Store Room’ and ‘Post Office’. These are welcome but it’s a bit too fiddly for my liking.

The player with the lowest score acquires the Caboose card and that means they get to choose an event to throw away – TtR:LotW will shower you with new events every year – and sets them up to go first in the next game.

It was a pretty easy game and everybody had a good time. We played our second game soon after.

2: 1868, HELPING HAND

Our first ticketing adventure was Ticket to Ride: Europe which had “train stations.” You could build these if your route was blocked by another player. It cost you shiny points but it was better than surrendering a ticket. Last minute reroutes are thrilling but often impossible when the board gets hot – Europe would often get congested around the centre. Japan is one of the most generous as players share a communal but finite Shinkansen train resource, with Great Lakes proving to be one of the most unforgiving in our collection, offering no hope other than reroutes.

In the second game, LotW offers its own escape route: the piggyback. If other players have blocked your routes, you have a piggyback card you can play once. It allows you to “piggyback” on another player’s trains but what it really means is that you can build the route as normal as if the player wasn’t there. This is a nice mechanic but you’ve only got a single piggyback – although there is an event which will allow you to flip your piggyback back to active. As it turned out, piggybacks – at least for the first few games – were little used.

Again the game was snappy and tickets were short. Another new mechanic was added as the year closed: employees. In short, they form a pool of powerups you can select from for your next game, with the losing player choosing first and also getting awarded an additional “President” employee which gives them an extra turn at the end of the game. The powerups range from discarding incomplete tickets to crafting locomotives from ordinary train cards. They’re all useful but they might also be bullshit if used inappropriately. As we will discover.

3: 1871, HIRE AND FIRE

Used to the rhythm of Pandemic Legacy, we were surprised the story deck unveiled no big changes at the start. All we had was our employee powerups.

Still, postcard sidequests were causing some confusion. The front of a postcard has some flavour text, some narrative behind the postcard… and we’ve started to ignore this. They’re printed in this elaborate cursive text that’s difficult to read and don’t really seem to connect much to a larger story, like pulling random fragments out of a hat and expecting the player to do all the work joining the story dots and building some emotional investment. The back of the postcard explains the sidequest. For example, I had a postcard which said “make $16 and you’ll get a $12 boost”. I failed this one in the previous game, but pulled it off this time.

But some of the postcards refer to mechanics that don’t yet exist. It isn’t spelt out in the instructions that postcards might refer to unannounced rules and sometimes you might be left wondering: am I supposed to understand this? More than once our pluckiest littlest player has had to ask for assistance in this regard. It’s a bit annoying as we’re supposed to keep this stuff secret from each other.

Again, not much to report during this game. At the end, the story deck revealed new rules relating to expanding the frontier – the winning player gets to choose which expansion is added onto the map. These are all stored facedown in a special box. We have three choices here: Florida, Open Range and Great Plains. Each expansion has a particular box of magic tricks associated with it and, as Florida had the biggest magic box of all, the people demanded Florida.

I was the winning player and got to choose the first expansion. I felt like I wanted to defer Big Florida to later, but in the end I relented. Sure, there are some new stops and a trackbed mechanic where you stick the colours onto blank trackbeds. But Florida’s surprise mechanic was the Circus Train. We read through the new rules and the excitement transformed into a strange silence.

Hmm. Yeah.

4: 1874, FLORID TRAINS

Okay, without being too spoilery about Pandemic Legacy: Season One, a search mechanic is introduced at some point which didn’t feel like a genius addition – more like a generic mechanic to increase pressure on player cards. Sure, it injected more tension into resource allocation decisions, but it felt like the design team had come up with a nice reusable card-drain that could be repainted, dressed up and rolled out to make the months seem fresh. We weren’t fooled.

Of course, there’s a legitimate risk of burying players in confusion with an onslaight of new mechanics, but the search mechanic felt a little bit like “we have no other ideas for these months”. A new search would prompt a new groan which, just like the search, resembled the previous groan.

Until Florida, many of the LotW changes had felt like good twists to the Ticket to Ride core. Until Florida.

For the circus train, players received sticker charts. If you built a train route at least three carriages long you would get to take the next sticker from the “Big Top” sticker wheel. There are some decisions to be made here as there are circus trains of different lengths and if you fill the longest, for which you need all five sticker colours, you get a whole $64 which is not to be sniffed at. Each carriage on your circus train must get a different colour and, considering the stickers are finite, you need to be careful about how much you want to play for the big top five. And there were dreaded “STOP” markers on the sticker spool for each number of players in the campaign, indicating when the sticker wheel was finished. How far will you go?

But… it felt like a gaudy decoration hung from the side of the game rather than a cool core change, completely orthogonal to what was happening on the board. And while you were permitted to see the next sticker coming up, it was far too easy to see further ahead by accident.

We could see what it was trying to do, complicating the game with timing concerns. Do you postpone your longer routes because you want the stickers? Playing for the $64 is fraught with peril. It might seem easy for the first few colours but waiting for that final colour might be deadly. Although the littlest hobo was really into sticker collecting, I think the rest of us found it a little… beneath us? It’s just not particularly interesting.

But this was the game where the employees totally screwed me up. As I had won the previous game, I had little employee choice after everybody had made their choices – so I opted for the Ticket Master who will let you throw away two incomplete tickets, no questions asked. This encouraged me to be completely reckless and I kept all four tickets at the start of the game. I even picked up more tickets later.

As other people’s trains dwindled, I began to sweat. Maybe I’d bitten off more than I could choo-choo? In fact, I didn’t complete my tickets until the very final turn of the game, which is insane. I did not play a great game – I came third – all because of the employee choice which made me feel invincible. With great power, comes great stoopid.

Mum was also having problems with her ticket selection; her tickets were all over place, completely disconnected, and additional tickets just made things worse. Boy was playing well but found, as the game got larger, waiting for his turn became increasingly stressy. I hadn’t seem him this anxious in a board game for years. I don’t want to congratulate the game on this particularly – I think it’s just how galaxy brain he is with board games now. Remember our last tabletop adventure was Pandemic co-op and everyone’s turn is a shared responsibility. The only person who wasn’t feeling the pressure was the li’l one, who seemed to be having a fabulous time collecting fucking stickers.

Boy was first, she came second. Mum, our Ticket to Ride Queen, was last. Shocker.

New mechanic alert. We discovered that from this game forward, the winner got to convert a small city of their choosing to a large city, permanently, via the joy of stickers. But which board was next? Boy chose the Great Plains to expand the upper half of the board.

And it was here we understood the rhythm of LotW. It is normally the job of the frontier boards to introduce new mechanics, rather than the story deck – the new rules depend entirely on the order with which you add the boards. Is this better? Really, I don’t know. It means the different groups of players will have quite different campaigns. But if the new mechanic doesn’t seem too exciting, such as the Big Top, you might not rush back to the table for another game. Also, you might not remember the new mechanic when you come back, because it’s introduced at the game end!

And because everything is a hybrid of postcards, story deck and frontier box contents, it can feel a bit “where the fuck are we right now”. I’ve read more than one player testimonial lamenting they don’t know where the rules are for some fresh mechanics.

So what did the Great Plains usher in? It brought the concept of a “company town” and, with it, the unmistakable odour of Pandemic. I’ll explain that next time. If I can remember the rules.

Next: Great Plans