Your First Three Games of Ticket to Ride

Your first three games of Ticket to Ride are where habits form. Some are rules slips, quietly played wrong because nobody checked. Others are legal moves that cost a lot of points. This lesson covers both, checked against the current Days of Wonder rulebook.

Rules slips to catch early

Taking a face-up locomotive as your second card. A face-up locomotive must be the first card you take, and then your draw is over. If you take a colored card first and a locomotive flips up to replace it, it stays there for the next player.

Choosing your second card before the row refills. When you take a face-up card, replace it from the deck right away. The new card is a fair choice for your second draw, unless it is a locomotive.

Mixing colors on a gray route. A gray route takes any color, but all the cards must be the same color. Locomotives can fill in. Two red and two green cards do not claim a gray 4.

Claiming half a route. You claim the whole route in one turn or not at all. You also need a train for every space, so late in the game a long route may be out of reach.

Doing two things in one turn. Draw, claim, or tickets. Claiming a route and then drawing cards is two turns.

Using both halves of a double route. One player can never own both. And with 2 or 3 players, once either route of a pair is claimed, the other is closed to everyone.

Returning old tickets. When you draw tickets, you may only return tickets from that draw. A ticket you kept earlier stays with you, for better or worse.

Ending the game a turn early. When a player ends a turn with 2 or fewer trains, everyone gets one more turn, and that includes the player who triggered it. That last turn for the triggering player is easy to forget.

Counting branches in the longest path. The bonus goes to the longest single continuous line of your trains. It can loop and revisit cities, but no train counts twice, so at a fork the line carries on down only one branch, and the other is left out.

Forgetting the three-locomotive reset. Any time 3 of the 5 face-up cards are locomotives, discard all 5 and deal 5 new ones.

The big strategic mistake: holding cards too long

New players love a big hand. It feels safe. They draw for eight or nine turns, waiting until they can claim every route on their tickets at once. Then someone claims the one route between their cities, and the plan falls apart.

Cards in your hand score nothing. Routes on the board score now and cannot be taken. The fix:

• Claim the narrow spots first. If only one or two routes lead into a city you need, claim one of them as soon as you can.
• Watch the face-up row. If another player keeps taking the color you are collecting, they may be heading your way.
• Spend a locomotive when it finishes a route someone else is likely to want.

Tickets that bite back

A failed ticket costs exactly what a finished one pays. Two ways new players fall into that hole:

Keeping every starting ticket. Keeping 3 or 4 tickets that point in different directions spreads your 45 trains too thin. Keep the ones that share cities or run the same way, and let the odd one go.

Drawing tickets late. Drawing 3 new tickets when the leader has only a handful of trains left almost always means keeping one you cannot finish. Draw tickets early, or when your railroad already covers a lot of the map.

Scattered railroads

The rules let you claim any open route, connected to your trains or not. That freedom tempts new players into grabbing a cheap route here and a long route there. At the end, none of it links up, so no ticket is complete and no long path exists.

Build toward a plan. Every route you claim should either finish a ticket, connect two pieces of your railroad, or score well on its own.

Not watching the train count

The end can arrive faster than you expect, because one player who builds every turn burns through 45 trains quickly. Glance at everyone’s supply every few turns. When someone drops to around a dozen trains, stop starting new projects and finish what you have.

Taking it personally

Claiming a route someone else needs is part of the game, not an insult. It usually is not even on purpose; the route was on your ticket too. Teach this before it happens: “If someone takes your route, go around.” A longer path costs trains, but it still finishes the ticket.

A quick checklist for game three

Before you act each turn, ask:

1. Is there a route I need that someone else might take this turn?
2. Can I finish every ticket I hold with the trains I have left?
3. How many trains does each other player have?

That habit fixes most of what goes wrong in the first three games. For more on routes, blocking, and ticket draws, our Ticket to Ride strategy guide picks up where this lesson stops.