One of the problems of living alone is that I don’t have anyone to play board games with, which is a shame because they fascinate me on a design level. At one time, board games ruled, and are quite old as a genre of gaming. Consider MancalaW, a very simple game that is engaging and fun and one of the first games I ever learned to play. The game play is also very easy to learn: you move stones from pit to pit, removing enemy stones under certain conditions. He with no stones loses.
Then I graduated to MonopolyW, which is a horrible game. Once you start losing, it’s extremely hard to turn your game around, so you spend most of the end game (which is usually relatively swift) waiting for the inevitable. Of course, there are classic games from my childhood that I also played, such as RiskW or Trouble (board game)W, and Mouse Trap (board game)W, which I never got to play because my mom didn’t want to spend the money. My mom did, however, get a coffee table book of old board games that was playable, so we spent many a weekend checking them out, and a lot of them were extremely good. I wish I could remember the name of the book, although I’d not be surprised if it’s still in my mom’s possession as part of her estate.
Sadly, as I mentioned above, I no longer have anyone to play board games with. Nowadays, board games, mostly from Germany, are amazingly well-designed and worthy of study. So I tend to buy the games, read the directions, play with the doohickeys, and then put them up in the closet. One of those games happens to be Days of WonderW‘s Ticket to Ride (board game)W.
Ticket to Ride is a railroad sim of sorts. You run a railroad company, and you need to complete railway tracks from location to location to create a rail line. For example, you may have a destination ticket that requires you to build rails from Los Angeles to New York. The board already has predetermined paths that you can use to get from one location to the other, however, you are given a limited number of train cars and are competing against one or more players who have their own destinations to deal with. It’s a really fun game to play, especially if you actually have someone to play with.
And then there’s the iPad, and thank you Steve Jobs and Days of Wonder!
Ticket to Ride is now available for iOS platforms! It costs $6.99 USD for the basic United States board, and you can purchase additional expansions for $0.99 USD each. The game is a complete port of Ticket to Ride and its expansions. There is both a video and in-game tutorial that guides you as you play your very first game (it’s toggle-able, so you can turn it off or on as needed). A great thing about the game is that it will auto-calculate your on-going and final scores, which is great if you suck at math like I do. There is also an online mode, where you can play against other people, however, I’ve not yet tried that.
The soundtrack is perfect, and I’m not one who tends to listen to game soundtracks. It has the right touch for the theme of the game.
Almost like the real thing
This is a great port that I can’t stop playing, and it may seem odd, in a sense, to port board games to the iOS platform, but it’s great not only for bringing the game to those who may not be able to play it as intended, or for introducing others to the game so that they go and buy the board game as well.
