Reading the Ticket to Ride USA Map: Hubs and Choke Points

Every game of Ticket to Ride on the USA map is different, because the tickets and cards are different. The board is not. The same cities sit at the same crossroads every game, and the same handful of routes get fought over again and again. Learning the map’s shape is the cheapest skill in the game: you study it once and use it forever.

The counts in this lesson come from the route list of the USA map and from our own shortest-path count across the 33 tickets in the current box.

The shape of the board

The map has 36 cities and 100 routes, with 22 pairs of double routes. Most routes are short: 36 of them are 2 trains long, and only 9 are 6 trains long.

Two things follow from that:

• Long routes are scarce. With 9 six-train routes on the whole board, a player who wants to score with them is competing for a short list. More on that in Level 3.
• Double routes ease the crowding, but only at 4 or 5 players. With 2 or 3, only one side of each pair can be claimed, so the board loses 22 routes worth 53 train spaces.

Hubs: the cities everyone passes through

Three cities connect to 7 neighbors each: Denver, Helena, and Pittsburgh. They are the map’s big junctions, with ways out in every direction.

But the busiest city is not the one with the most routes. It is the one on the most tickets’ paths. When we traced the shortest route for every ticket in the box, Kansas City sat in the middle of about 13 of the 33. Pittsburgh came next at about 10, then Oklahoma City and St. Louis at about 9 each.

The single busiest route was the short gray link between Kansas City and Oklahoma City, on the shortest path of about 10 tickets. It is a double route, which helps at 4 or 5 players and helps nobody at 2 or 3.

Some shortest paths tie, so treat these as rough counts. The lesson is solid either way: the middle of the map, from Omaha down through Kansas City to Oklahoma City and east through St. Louis to Pittsburgh, is where railroads collide.

Two surprises: St. Louis and Raleigh are each a crossroads on many paths, but neither city appears on a single ticket. Las Vegas and Charleston are on no ticket either. Nobody needs to end in those cities, but plenty of players need to pass through St. Louis and Raleigh.

Dead ends: cities with few ways in

At the other extreme are cities you can enter only a few ways.

• Two neighbors: Vancouver, Las Vegas, and Boston. Boston’s two links, to New York and Montréal, are both double routes, so at 4 or 5 players it is safer than it looks.
• Three neighbors: Portland, San Francisco, Houston, Miami, Washington, and Charleston.

Miami is the classic squeeze. It has three ways in: a 5 from Atlanta, a 4 from Charleston, and a 6 from New Orleans, and none of them is a double route. Three tickets in the box end in Miami. If you hold one, look at those three routes on your first turn, and claim the one you need before a rival does.

Crossing the West

Most long tickets cross the mountains, and there are only a few ways to do it. From the Pacific coast, the main lines run east from Vancouver and Seattle into Calgary and Helena, from Portland and San Francisco into Salt Lake City, and from Los Angeles out through Las Vegas, Phoenix, or El Paso.

Several of them are long routes in a single color, such as the 6-train routes from Seattle to Helena, Portland to Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles to El Paso. That makes the West a place to plan early: collect for your crossing in the opening, because a 6-train route takes several turns of drawing, and once it is gone the detour is long.

The quiet East

The Northeast is crowded with short routes and double routes: Pittsburgh, New York, Washington, Raleigh, and Boston are tied together by 2-train links. Each one is cheap, and many are doubled. That makes the East forgiving. Lose one route and there is usually another a train or two longer.

Using the map in your next game

1. When you choose tickets, notice how many pass through the middle. A hand that runs through Kansas City and St. Louis will be contested.
2. When you plan a path, find the dead-end cities on it first. Claim into them early.
3. When you have a choice of routes, prefer the ones that are not on everyone’s way. A path along the edge is quieter.

The midgame lesson in Level 2 and the blocking lesson in Level 3 build on this map sense. For now, just look at the board for one minute before the game starts. You will see the fights coming.