Consolation Prize

Released last Wednesday Ticket to Ride, another renowned board-game, swelled the ranks of Xbox Live Arcade and joined the list of other great boardgames which have been given the Xbox Live treatment such as Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne.

Ticket to Ride ranks as one of my favourite boardgames of all time, mainly because it’s so simple to learn, easy to play, fast flowing, and it’s just an enormous amount of fun when played with a group of good friends.

This version is a nigh on perfect conversion and plays exactly the same as the original board-game featuring the American version of the map. The aim of the game is simply to complete “Tickets” across North America, for example “Seattle to New York” by linking cities together. How you get from “A” to “B” is up-to the player but because in most cases there’s only one connection between cities, which when claimed can’t be used by any other player, competition for routes is fierce and claiming strategic positions on the map before your opponents is crucial to your overall success. Instead of going into more depth about the game mechanics I’ll instead just point you in the general direction of my board-game review
here.

I should be happy, nay ecstatic, with this “accurate” port right? Well unfortunately I’m not. The fantastic game mechanics are all intact and the gameplay is as good as always, kudos to the developers Next Level Games for this achievement, but the presentation could have been so much better!

I had visions of a beautifully realised map of North America, one that would do the game proud and provide an interesting backdrop for the game, but instead the choice has been made to make it look as close to the board-game as possible. In fact in my opinion I actually think it looks slightly worse than the original map. I can appreciate why the developers decided to stay true to the board-game in order to keep the purists happy but the move onto the Xbox 360 was the perfect opportunity to update the visuals with some slick new graphics to help make it stand out from the crowd and become more appealing to non-board-game geeks. To compound issues with the presentation further both the player avatars and coloured route cards all appear to be out of focus and smudged; Whether this is by design or not it just doesn’t look that great.

At the end of the day Ticket to Ride is one hell of an enjoyable board-game and if you can overlook the presentation of this Arcade conversion then beneath the plain surface there’s an excellent and solid gaming experience to be had. However, personally I’d just prefer to dig out the board-game.