Just released in the last few weeks is the American printing of Ticket to Ride: Märklin, which is now the second stand-alone sequel to the 2004 Spiel-des-Jahr zillion-selling Ticket to Ride.  I will say a couple of words about the TTR series in general, and then move into a bit of a discussion about the awesomely cool bits and challenging gameplay of the new edition.

Ticket to Ride (BGG link here) is a family-friendly set-collecting/ rail-laying game with colorful plastic train cars.  The original edition used an American map, and the rules were pretty easy to grasp.  Four or five player games could easily play in less than 90 minutes.  You start the game with 2 or 3 route cards each showing two cities on the map.  By the end of the game, you have to connect the routes on your cards, or you lose points equal to the value of the route, rather than gaining them.  On your turn, you either draw 2 cards OR you claim a route on the map.  Card draws can come from either a face-down deck, or from one of five face up piles.  The only catch here is that a “wild” locomotive card drawn from a face-up pile uses up your whole turn.  There is no limit to hand size, but you have to watch what your opponents are doing, as they may be looking to claim a route that is critical to your plans.  To claim a route, say a 6 link section marked with orange boxes, you need 6 orange cards, or some combination of orange and wilds.  You do this all at once, and you can only claim one route a turn.  There is a scoring premium for longer routes and longer track sections, but you can also use a turn to grab more destination routes from that deck, so you can also build a strategy around lots of short routes rather than 2 or 3 routes with a transcontinental connection.

The original TTR is a fun game, and is still a little more accessable to family, non-gamers, etc.  After you have played TTR a few times, you realize that the destination routes can be a little arbitrary.  Basically, if you draw from the destination deck late in the game and pick up a valuable “Vancouver to Montreal” connection after you’ve already completed New York to Seattle, well, chances are you just won the game.  Last year saw the release of the first standalone variant, Ticket to Ride: Europe (click here for BGG link). Obviously, this one uses a map of Europe along with a couple of other new mechanics.  There’s a semi-random element involving routes with “tunnels” where you may need an extra card or two in order to claim the route, and there are also little plastic station pieces which might let you use another player’s route to make an important connection of your own.

This year, we get Ticket to Ride: Märklin (BGG here).The name comes from a German company which makes model railroad cars (you pronounce it MERRcklin, not MARRklin).  The map shows Germany, and the cards each have a picture of a Märklin model railroad car.  As a box-insert bonus, you get a complete Märklin catalog on CD-ROM.  The board is solid, the map is interesting, and the overall quality of the bits, including the card art, is just fantastic. 

The big catch in this year’s edition is the inclusion of little plastic passenger people in each of the five colors.  Now, any time you claim a route, you can drop a little plastic person into one of the cities that you just connected, provided no one else is already sitting there.  Later on, you can forego a turn in order to run a passenger around on track that you control.  As you pass through cities, you can pick up little point tokens that are stacked neatly in each town.  There are special passenger cards which allow you to ride one section of track belonging to another player.  The real trick with the passenger movement is that there is a value to going first.  Stacks are pretty finite, and the higher value chips are always on top.  For example, Berlin, the best city, has a stack which goes 7–6–5–4, while smaller towns may only have a single 2 chip.  You only get to run a single passenger once, then it goes back in the box.  Thus, you have an incentive to run your guy through a particular town before you opponent gets a chance to, but you also want to wait as long as possible in order to build up your network and hit as many cities as possible.

TTR:M also has two stacks of destination cards, one for short (5–11 point) routes and one for long routes (12–22 points).  From the start of the game onwards you decide how much risk or bang for the buck you want.  Whenever you draw four cards, you decide which deck each card will come from.  Thus, it becomes a very valid strategy to keep hitting the deck of short routes, especially since there’s a 10 point bonus at the end for the person who completes the greatest number of routes, regardless of their quality.

The beauty of all of this lies in the number of agonizing decisions that you have to make from one turn to the next.  You have to run the risk that if you take on too many routes, you may not finish them all before the end of the game.  You have to decide when to run your passengers: this can result in a real bonanza if you run at the right time, but can cause problems if other people get the right cards a little before you do and manage to claim the little cardboard chips that you had your eye on.  You also have to balance your hand, and hope that when your turn comes around that the right colors will be in the face-up pile, because anytime you pull from the top of the deck it can be a bit of a crapshoot.  Although TTR:M only adds a couple of new mechanics to the base game (and nothing from TTR: Europe), it makes for a game that feels much harder.

Scores in TTR:M tend to be pretty close for much of the game, although usually after all the routes are scored at game end you have a pretty clear winner, and the pack may be spread out by 50 points or more.  I’ve played the game twice now, and finished second both times.  Things work pretty tightly, and you have to be very efficient in terms of getting the right cards at the right time to really steam through to victory.  A little bit of conflict with another player can hurt if someone else steals that short 1 link connection that you needed to pull together both halves of your network.  In short, TTR:M manages to feel like a marriage between a super-meaty German gamer’s game and and luck-driven pull-the-right-card family game.  I’d say that it has just about everything you want in a Euro-style boardgame.  Did I mention that the bits look fantastic?

The downsides to TTR:M are as follows: one, the above mentioned difficulty curve will scare away some family members.  Yet, a few very snobby boardgamers still find the overall game system to be a little too light.  There is an additional setup requirement for this edition in that you have to sort out the little cardboard scoring chips that go into various cities on the map, but this still takes less than 5 minutes to do.  You will have to learn German geography in a hurry.  Despite the little hints on the route cards, you may still spend some time racking your brain trying to find Wolfsburg on the map.

If you like a lighter game and want something you could actually play with your family (say, kids 10 and older), then you owe it to yourself to check out the original TTR.  If you consider yourself a little bit more of a gamer, and want a supremely balanced Euro-game with pretty bits and plenty of challenge, then Märklin is the way to go.  If you want a REAL rail game, stick to the 18xx series and all of the hours of tedium that you will find there.  For now, I’m pretty keen on Märklin.