Ticket to Ride celebrates its 15th anniversary with a special edition of the train game this summer

Ticket to Ride is marking its 15th anniversary with a new special edition of Alan R. Moon’s popular train board game pulling in this summer.

Moon’s game of drawing cards and laying down chains of carriages to complete routes won the German Game of the Year award, the Spiel des Jahres, in 2004, and has expanded from the original game’s map of US railroads to cover everywhere from Europe to India across multiple eras.

The game has also been adapted into a digital app for PC, mobile and video game consoles, as well as an upcoming reality TV series, and neatly trimmed for the recent compact city-hopping offerings of Ticket to Ride: New York and London.

Still, it’s the original board game that has managed to find a place in the pantheon of modern classics alongside games like Catan and Carcassonne, shifting a whopping eight million copies around the world according to publisher Days of Wonder.

The upcoming Ticket to Ride: 15th Anniversary Special Edition includes the first game’s US map, with the artwork looking slightly revamped across the board and cards, if still largely faithful to the original. What is new are the set’s translucent plastic train carriages, replacing the solid pieces of old in the same colours – only, this time, they’re slightly see-through.

A four-page booklet accompanying the game delves into the creation of Ticket to Ride (for what it’s worth, you can actually find a longer making of feature in this issue of Tabletop Gaming magazine from 2016!), while the whole game comes in a new box sleeve produced to mark the occasion.
 
Ticket to Ride’s 15th anniversary special edition will be released on August 9th. It’ll cost $50 (£41) in the US – around £15 more than the standard game typically sells for nowadays, and half the price of Pandemic’s flashy 10th anniversary set released last year, although that went further with a metal tin, miniatures and overhauled artwork.

Still, Ticket to Ride has become a modern classic over the last 15 years for a reason – if you haven’t picked it up yet, this could be the perfect excuse.