Main Catalogue |  Board Games & Card Games |  Days of Wonder |  Ticket to Ride Marklin Edition

Ticket to Ride Marklin Edition Price: £39.99 Published by Days of Wonder Ticket to Ride - Märklin Edition is the third installment in Days of Wonder\'s best-selling boardgame series that has won 14 international game awards, including the prestigious Spiel des Jahres. The board map for the Märklin Edition is based on a map of Germany and introduces Passengers and merchandise to the Ticket to Ride gameplay. This edition is named after Märklin, a German company that has been around for over 140 years and is the world\'s leader in the miniature train hobby. ++++++++++++++++++++ Counter magazine review ++++++++++++++++++++ 2-5 players, 60 minutes designed by Alan Moon reviewed by Ben Baldanza Days of Wonder and Alan Moon have created the best franchise game of the decade so far. The original 2004 edition deservedly won the SdJ, and the game was made stronger in the Europe edition that followed with a new map and new strategies using tunnels and stations. Märklin, the third in the series, continues the trend of keeping the basic system intact but adding enough new features to make the game stand on its own. In this version, the tunnels and stations of Europe are gone, the map is all Germany, and now passengers can be delivered as a way to score points. The map is more forgiving than the European map, with more middle-length segments and less reliance on single and double length routes. Yet those that do exist are key and likely will be taken early in the game. About a third of the routes use neutral colors as well, and most of the critical short routes are neutral. The game plays like the others in that on a turn a player can draw cards or play cards to claim a route. Also like the other games, a player can use a turn to take new destination cards. What is new in the game, and a super addition, is that now a fourth option is to move passengers. At the beginning of the game, each city is seeded with a set of tokens in decreasing value. Red cities, for example, have three tokens numbered 4, 3, and 2 and stacked in that order. A number of cities have a single `2\' token on them. Berlin uniquely has four tokens starting with a `7\'. These tokens represent the value of a passenger carried through that city. Each player begins the game with three passengers. When playing cards to claim a route, a player can also place one of their passengers at either end of the route just played. On a later turn, this passenger can be moved across the player\'s network, picking up the top token in each city he travels through (but not where he starts). Once moved, the passenger is removed from the game. Thus each player has three opportunities to score this way, and this scoring can be significant. The challenge is that waiting to move the passengers can create a longer run and thus more visit more cities. But the stacking of tokens encourages early movement of the passengers to claim the highest values. This is an excellent implementation of a great concept. A new map and passengers aren\'t the only new things in Märklin. There are two new card types; one is the ``Locomotive +4\'\'. This is a joker that can only be used on routes of length four or greater. But in a nice consideration, this card can be taken from the face up display as one of two cards taken, unlike the standard locomotives. The longest train card has also been replaced with the ``most completed tickets\'\' card. This encourages the completion of multiple short distance destinations if possible. The destination tickets in Märklin are identified on their backs as long-haul or short-haul, and players have the choice when choosing cards to pick the mix they want. Longer haul cards of course give greater points, but shorter haul cards make it easier to get the bonus. In this game, the value of a connected network comes in the ability to carry passengers over longer distances, rather than in the game end bonus. The second new card type is the passenger card. This can be taken like any colored train card, and they are used to travel on another players\' network during the passenger movement. Each segment of another network that is used requires the playing of a passenger card. The passenger card becomes a ``floating station\'\' in the Ticket to Ride Europe sense. Using these cards, passengers can take some long journeys even if your own network is not fully connected. Märklin is more complex than the original game and more fun than the European game. The passenger movement adds just the right amount of strategy and like all the games, you want to do more than you can and each turn is a tough decision, especially later in the game. In addition to the long and short tickets, each ticket draw allows four cards to be taken and thus the ability to score is widely varied among building routes, carrying passengers, and completing tickets. In this sense, Märklin is by far the most balanced of the three games so far, and it is well worth getting for anyone who likes this basic design. The production is exactly what you\'d expect, and the Märklin tie-in is a smart and hopefully successful strategy for Days of Wonder. The Märklin name is well known throughout the world as the leading maker of model trains, and their trains are the basis for the cards in the game. If the Märklin name alone brings people to this game that would otherwise not find it, it could boost the franchise popularity even greater. It will be interesting to see if the game is well distributed through hobby stores that carry model trains and if it sells in this venue. Can anyone think of a better combination of design and marketing than this one? More ...

Main Catalogue |  Board Games & Card Games |  Days of Wonder |  Ticket to Ride Marklin Edition