Apathy Blogs

I really wanted to review Road to Legends, an expansion for Descent. It is an expansion I’ve been waiting for since I purchased the base game last summer. It hasn’t been released quite yet however and I promise not to review a game until I’ve actually played it. Considering the length of time a campaign will take, it may be a month before I can give it a proper review. Next week I’ll be looking at Super Smash Bros. Brawl, once I’ve actually managed to unlock all the characters. So this week I am taking a break from Fantasy Flight Games and taking a look at Ticket to Ride: Switzerland from Days of Wonder.

Switzerland is an expansion to any of the Ticket to Ride games. You need the pieces from Ticket to Ride, Europe Edition, or Marklin Edition. All of these games are really the same, they just have different maps. During the game you score points for claiming different train routes. The longer the route, the more points it is worth. If someone has claimed a route, you can’t put your trains there. This is very important when you are trying to complete tickets, which is where the real substantial point gains are. At the beginning of the game you draw five tickets, and can choose to keep between two and five of them. Each ticket has two destinations and a point value. If you manage to connect the destinations with your trains by the end of the game, you earn the points. If you don’t, you lose the points. If someone claims a route you were planning to use, you may have to go way around or lose a lot of points.

This version of the map is a lot tighter than the others. It only allows two or three players. It is very easy to cut somebody off from their intended route, unintentionally or on purpose. If you want a shorter, more competitive game, this is the version to get. I won’t bother playing the bigger map now unless I have four or five players. This map also tends to be a lot more ticket intensive. On your turn you can draw three new tickets and you must keep at least one of them. In the first game we played I was surprised that my friend was able to pull way ahead with a lot of tickets, despite being twenty points behind at the end of the game. He connected France with Austria and scored four tickets at fourteen points each for it, plus several smaller tickets for cities along the way.

Most of the bad things I can say about this game are related to it being an expansion. It’s good enough to be a stand alone game on its own. There isn’t a place to store the tickets in the box when you have opened it, but since you’ll need parts from a full game anyway I recommend keeping them in the main box. Since I have Ticket to Ride: Europe, which doesn’t have five length routes, I had to look on the internet to discover they were worth ten points. An extra card for scoring reference would have been handy. It is a solid map though, and a great game for when you only have a few players.

Apathy Rating: 3/5