Top 1 Xbox 360 Site

Developed by Playful Entertainment, Ticket to Ride challenges players to plan cross-country rail routes across North America and visit all the city stops in-between, racking up points as they race to reach the most destinations. The game supports play with up to five people on Xbox Live or four people on the same console and supports the Xbox LIVE Vision Cam for hours of family-friendly fun.

Genre: Board

Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

Developer: Playful Entertainment

Online Play: 5 Versus

Local Play: 4 Versus

June 24, 2008 –
More and more popular board games — like Carcassone and Catan — are making their way onto Microsoft’s download service to much acclaim. The latest of these formerly cardboard-based games to make its way to XBLA is Ticket to Ride, a release that prompts up to five players to construct sprawling train tracks from one North American city to the next.

The puzzle element harkens back to games like Uno as players need to accumulate like-colored cards that can only be played on a track of that same color. Some tracks require only one card to build, others require six. Of course there are a few wrenches thrown into the machine. Any color can be used to build on grey spaces and there are locomotive cards that are wild and can be played anywhere on the board in conjunction with other cards and also act as score multipliers.

Click here to watch intense action.

But building these massive expanses of steel and nails isn’t as simple as aimlessly laying track from one random North American city to the next. Instead players will have to draw three destination cards and hold at least one. The point values for these destination cards vary depending on the distance from city to city. Obviously Salt Lake City to El Paso won’t be worth nearly as much a track spanning from Atlanta to San Francisco. It’s a bummer that North America is the only terrain that you can build on and the space is mainly contained to the United States with only cities such as Calgary and Winnipeg making the cut from our brothers to the north.

She’s got a ticket to ride…Luckily the grid of potential tracks that run from city to city is well constructed and allows for different strategic approaches. Sometimes players, both AI-controlled bots and humans, will notice you obviously heading for a specific city. They can then build tracks to try and block your progress with tracks of their own. Then there’s the strategy that governs how you use your cards. Since you have multiple destination cards at any one time, it’s important to wrap your head around the various colors that you’ll need to accumulate to progress across the country to your goal.

Playing online allows you to join up with humans or AI (or both) and start building your track to glory. Online performs identically to single-player with no lag or differences in gameplay. I would have liked to see different routes drawn between cities in the two different modes, but instead you’ll travel the same path each time you play. It’s also a shame that there’s zero story built around the action. There’s no need for much, but something to tie it all together would have really helped this game gel.

Closing Comments
The biggest problem that most will have with Ticket to Ride is that it