Ticket to Ride: Northern Lights

We've lost count of the number of alternative versions and expansions of Ticket to Ride that Days of Wonder have published in the two decades that have passed since Alan R Moon designed the original game. Along with new maps, the expansions have usually introduced incremental tweaks to the complexity of the gateway game, and Days of Wonder have experimented too with further simplified versions themed around a major city so that the game can double as a holiday souvenir. Northern Lights is neither. It's a standalone game rather than an expansion and it offers an alternative starting point for anyone who has yet to board the Ticket to Ride express.

The map for Northern Lights covers Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, touching also on Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Russia. It's not Ticket to Ride's first visit to Scandinavia. Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries was published in 2007 and covered some similar territory but that was designed specifically for just two or three players. By contrast, TTR: Northern Lights takes 2-5 players. The principal 'tweak' from the vanilla map of Europe or map of USA game is that Northern Lights introduces end-game bonus cards that are an additional way of scoring that players can compete for alongside their routes. The game comes with 11 different bonus cards, from which four are selected at random and set out at the start of the game. The points they offer don't make these cards fundamental game changers but they are something extra for players to have an eye to when selecting and competing for tickets/completed routes.

For players already familiar with Ticket to Ride, the differences in Northern Lights relate to the way in which locomotive cards are used. In all iterations of Ticket to Ride, locomotive cards are 'wild' in that they can be used to substitute for a card of any colour. In Northern Lights, certain 'ferry' routes demand locomotive cards but the game introduces the option of using any pair of matching colour cards as a locomotive. This actually makes the game 'easier' and arguably speeds up play because it means there are fewer 'wasted' cards. Some routes in this version of the game reward players with additional card draws from the deck, which adds to their attraction and, again, contributes to further speeding up an already brisk game.

For those coming new to Ticket to Ride, Northern Lights is a perfectly good base game to jump in on, and its Arctic theme could make this version a very appropriate seasonal choice. The only negative is that for anyone from outside the Arctic Circle, there will be a lot of alien placenames and new geography to learn. For seasoned players, the TTR: Northern Lights map invites some interesting tactical choices: there are a lot of routes that demand one or more locomotives but the option of using any matching pair of colours as a locomotive easily compensates for this. The other attraction of these routes is that they take cards of any colour, so it can make sense to look out for tickets that use these potentially more flexible routes. Note too tho' that the Northern Lights map doesn't have any routes with more than five spaces, so with this map 10 points is the maximum amount you can score for any one route placement. The map incorporates a lot of short pinchpoint routes, so there's plenty of scope for highly competitive players to try to block each other with 'take that' placements...

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