Ticket to Ride Openings: Tickets and First Turns

Ticket to Ride has no fixed opening the way chess does. Your tickets and cards are different every game. But strong openings follow the same pattern: keep tickets that work together, find the routes everyone will fight over, and get your trains onto those routes before anyone else.

Choosing your starting tickets

In the current edition you see 4 tickets and keep at least 2 (older boxes deal 3). That makes the first decision of the game a real one.

Look at each ticket on the map before you decide. Ask four questions:

• Do they share a city? Two tickets that both end in the same city can share most of one railroad. That is the best kind of overlap.
• Do they point the same way? Two east to west tickets across the north work together even without a shared city. One north to south ticket and one east to west ticket may share only a single crossing.
• Where do they run? Tickets through the middle of the map cross everyone’s paths and invite fights. Tickets along the edges are often quieter.
• What are they worth? A high-value ticket that fits your other tickets is a gift. A high-value ticket that pulls your railroad in a new direction is a loan you have to repay.

The rulebook’s own scoring example shows why overlap matters. A player who completes two tickets that both end in Atlanta, one from Montréal and one from New York, collects 15 points from tickets that can share much of the same track.

How many to keep

Keep 2 when the other tickets point somewhere else. Two tickets that fit well beat three that fight each other.

Keep 3 or 4 only when they overlap heavily. More tickets means more points and a better shot at the longest path, but every one you fail counts against you.

A rough check: estimate how many trains each kept ticket needs if you build the most direct path. If the total is near 45 before you have built anything, you kept too many. You will need spare trains for detours.

Your first few turns

Most openings start by drawing cards. You begin with only 4 train cards, rarely enough to claim the route you want most.

Draw toward the colors of the routes you will need first. Two rules of thumb:

• Take a face-up card when it is a color you need right now. You know exactly what you get.
• Draw blind when the row has nothing you need. Of the 110 train cards, 14 are locomotives, so at the start of the game roughly 1 blind draw in 8 is a wild card, and it costs you only half your draw.

Taking a face-up locomotive uses your whole turn’s draw. It is worth it when the wild card lets you claim a contested route on your next turn. Otherwise, two useful colored cards are usually better.

Find the routes everyone wants

Trace your path and look for the spots where you have no good alternative. These are your bottlenecks:

• A city with only two or three routes into it.
• A short route that is the only sensible link between two big regions of the map.
• A single route between two cities where the detour is long.

Claim these first, even when they are short and score only 1 or 2 points. A 2-train route that keeps your railroad intact is worth far more than its points.

Routes with nobody else nearby can wait. So can long routes in a color nobody else is collecting.

Plan one railroad, not three

The best openings build a spine: one continuous line that connects as many of your ticket cities as possible. Every route you add to the spine finishes tickets and lengthens your path for the 10-point bonus at the same time.

Tickets that branch off the spine are fine. Tickets that need a second, separate railroad on the other side of the map are the expensive ones.

Player count changes the opening

With 2 or 3 players, only one route of each double pair can ever be claimed. The bottlenecks are tighter than they look, and the first player to reach a bottleneck owns it. Claim earlier.

With 4 or 5 players, both routes of a pair are open to different players, but more players are looking for the same cities. Watch the face-up row closely; it shows what everyone is collecting.

A good opening, in practice

There is no perfect target. After your first several turns, a strong opening usually looks like this:

• Your kept tickets share a city or a direction.
• You have claimed the one or two bottleneck routes on your spine.
• Your hand holds the colors for your next route, not just a pile of everything.

For a deeper look at which tickets to keep and when to draw more, the Ticket to Ride strategy guide covers the same ground with more examples.