TL;DR

I’m thinking about a transposition of the venerable Ticket to Ride.

Ticket to Ride is an amazing and fun game. I actually played Ticket to Ride: Europe, but the base game logic is the same.

Alas it’s not exactly something that you might play around. There are a lot of pieces, and it’s easy to mess them on th board with a bump to the table (e.g. while traveling).

This got me thinking about a roll-and-write transposition, using paper sheets to keep track of stuff (deployed carts, cards in hand, stations, …) and dice to simulate cards.

Here’s where I arrived so far:

• Colors: we will consider six colors only, so that they can be mapped onto the six faces of a 6d die (some variants alraedy have six colors only). Well… actually we will get rid of colors completely, and only consider die faces.

• Drawing tickets: tickets are printed in a sheet, arranged in six groups of six tickets each. A die is rolled once to select a group, once again to get a ticket inside the group. If already taken, the next is taken, then the next, etc.

• Drawing cards: five dice are rolled and take the role of the five face-up cards. Each represents its value, except doubles that jointly represent a jolly card. Taking a card means marking a resource on one’s sheet, then the die is re-rolled.

• Drawing from the pile: a die is rolled twice (or two, but in sequence), if the two rolls yield the same value then get a jolly, otherwise the last value that came out.

• Using cards: cross available cards on the tracking sheet and on the board too, in correspondence of the route to realize. Routes are marked with small dice picture to show the needed value (an empty square means any die value, as long as are all the same).

I’ll try to prototype this in the coming days… I hope it works, because I like the game but I don’t play it often because of the time/space it requires.

Stay safe!