TL;DR

I’m thinking about next steps with Ticket to Write

I’m quite happy that Ticket to Write drew some interest.

My main goal was to work within the constraints of having pen, papers and a few dice, and try to re-create the overall experience with substitute mechanisms relying on these game parts. That, I think, worked OK.

On the other hand, I’m quite disappointed by the fact that it owes a lot to Ticket to Ride London: the graph of the map and, in one board case, the mechanism for additional scoring. I have to admit that I chose it because it had 6 colors (matching the 6 faces of the die) and I thought that the graph was somehow “battle tested” and thus not boring.

The next step might be to come out with a different map/graph. Tickets were already invented ex-novo because I didn’t have a list of official tickets and anyway I needed exactly 36 of them. They were manually selected from the list of all possible candidates, with a small pre-filtering.

But maybe I should just go one step up and code something that finds out interesting setups by itself. Like coming up with a graph and some tickets, and simulate many games to see how it scores. Which also means coding what “fun” might be. This might be fun.

Well, now I wrote it, so I will not forget it and I’ll be able to blame myself for yet another thing that just got forgotten.

Stay safe folks!