Ticket to Ride shows the future of board games may be digital

When people talk about entry-level board games, the kind designed to get your buddies over the hobby’s notoriously high barrier for entry, a few games are mentioned. Settlers of Catan gets first billing as a classic. Then you have modern titles like Dominion, wacky things like Cards Against Humanity, and others.

Of course, there’s also a little game about trains called Ticket to Ride, which has one of the least enticing premises of all time (you’re building networks of trains? Really?) but which has become a staple of the casual board game geek’s table.

Now it’s leading the charge of official releases onto the PC platform. Ticket to Ride the digital edition released on Steam two weeks ago, long after its iDevice release. And while it packs all of the game’s goodness into electronic form, it’s hard not to be concerned about what we’re missing.

Board games have been taking to iDevice versions like fish to water. Dozens of classics, from Catan to Puerto Rico, have been adapted, along with a bunch of games which have been ascribed newfound popularity through digital versions, most notably Ascension: Chronicles of the Godslayer. Various sites around the web have long offered questionably legal free multiplayer versions of famous titles, as well, from 7 Wonders to Race for the Galaxy.

Electronic board games hold a lot of appeal. They’re cheaper, for one. A full-fledged board game tends to cost at the very least thirty dollars, with many breaking fifty or sixty. Furthermore, they’re inconvenient: it’s hard to lug around all eighteen million billion expansions for Dominion, and if you leave one at home you’re quite possibly alienating that guy who loved some aspect of Hinterlands. Even more convenient is online play. Buy a digital version of Settlers of Catan, and you don’t have to worry about finding three other people who want to play it in real life. You can just do it.

For a game like Ticket to Ride this last point is especially salient. Ticket to Ride is not an event game. No one gets excited to build train lines across America. They get excited to play Arkham Horror, or games about anything more interesting than trains. The difference is, while some of these thematic games accurately emulates the experience of getting drunk at a seedy dive bar (sometimes good, sometimes you don’t wake up in the morning), Ticket to Ride has an enjoyable mechanical core.

Well, that’s half true. The board games that tend to work well online are the very European ones: that is, the games that play like complicated versions of Solitaire. For instance, Race for the Galaxy is a better computer game than it is a board game, because you are almost entirely unimpacted by what other people do. Your empire expands whether or not they exist; while they might unexpectedly help you out, you’re rarely counting on them to do so.

Ticket to Ride sometimes works like this. Ticket to Ride’s central mechanic is drawing colored cards to place railroad lines between cities, building long stands or cobbled-together webs to connect faraway locations. The game’s strategy comes from the fact that each line can only have one, at most two, railroads on them. So say you want to build between Duluth and Chicago. You save up the necessary cards to build there, but lo, one of your opponents builds a train there right before you can! You’re locked out of the business.

Ticket to Ride, the computer game, works best with two to three players, precisely because with two to three this event hardly ever happens. That’s what’s missing from online board games: the anguished wails of your opposition. The physical interactions between players. Two to three players, these interactions are rare, and Ticket to Ride is, effectively, a solitaire game. You’re building your train lines in the Southeast, while your opponent builds in the Northwest, and never the twain shall meet. With five players, Ticket to Ride becomes, dare I say, a party game: everyone’s building everywhere, you’re fighting for scraps of territory, and getting all up in each others’ shit. Tactics are replaced with a slapdash rush to scrape out a train empire, and the people become more important than the game itself.

That’s the best way to play tabletop Ticket to Ride: wacky, zany, toe-steppingly. Computerized Ticket to Ride comes best in its smaller form: making tactical decisions, building up a railroad network independent of your opponent, seeing who’s got the biggest at the end.

Which, of course, makes it much more like a video game. It becomes a test of skill rather than a series of “fuck you” moments. Everything takes on a decidedly impersonal sheen. Even playing incredibly close, tense games multiplayer led me to merely a fraction of the investment I have in physical board games.

It’s the nature of the beast. Online board games deliver the same nuts and bolts experience for cheaper than the real thing, but there’s something satisfying and worthwhile about plopping a board on the dining room table, clearing off the napkins and food scraps, and playing Ticket to Ride. About placing your trains physically on cardboard, cruelly mocking your foes until the next card turns over in their favor. That’s something lost in the electronic shuffle. I’ve played some fabulously tense online games of Ticket to Ride, including a pretty incredible duel which ended with the two of us a point apart, but it isn’t the same. It’s not because the two of us never said a word to each other, creating a kind of silent intensity.

Ticket to Ride does show how online board games could be successful, though, and it’s precisely why they’ve relegated themselves to ultraportable phones and tablets. Playing the game on laptops against friends in the same room removes all the bad parts of board games: the setup, the mathematical calculations, forgetting whose turn it is because someone just walked into the room and had to know about the game we were playing. As an electronic board for a local game it works brilliantly, enabling quick, compulsive play that’s small enough to fit into a lunch break.

So despite its flaws, Ticket to Ride can be recommended. It possesses all of the structural purity common to board games, where simplicity and elegance win out over flash and fancy graphics (unless, of course, your game is Arkham Horror). For the board gamer there’s something ineffable absent from the straight ahead online multiplayer, but for the neophtye it’s a perfect introduction to a brave new world.