Ticket to Ride and Memoir ’44

Days of Wonder Review: Circleville Boardgaming Group

In Days of Wonder’s Ticket to Ride you and others are in charge of building rail networks across America. Can you connect the cities’ connection cards you have drawn at the beginning of the game, by building the best and longest routes to earn victory before the others do it?

On your turn you can either draw train cards or build a route. Routes are built by playing cards of the same color as the color of the track on the board. Where no color is determined, you can play a set of any one color to build that route. Larger routes pay more victory points and of course smaller may often get you to the next destination but will pay less victory points. You can later draw more city connection cards and hope you can connect those to your network before the end of the game.

Ticket to Ride, the World’s best Board Game in 2004, comes in many guises. There are now T2R games for many countries and continents and even oceans. Ticket to Ride is a family friendly, fun route building game. Family friendly that is, until someone builds into that city you need and you cannot get there and you lose a bunch of points. And … for “older gamers” – the game will have you humming that Beatle Song while you play, and she don’t care!

Days of Wonder’s Memoir’44 takes you and a friend to the battle fields of Europe in WWII. Starting with a blank board, you build a battlefield with tiles depicting different terrain. The “scenario” you are playing determines the terrain and pieces you will use. Whether you are Americans invading the beaches of France or fighting through the hedgerows, Memoir’ 44s simple system allows for two players playing head to head, to explore WWII like never before.

Will your tank units sweep around the flank and attack your enemies from the flank, or will they spring a surprise or two and crush your advance and win the game. Expansion sets add additional WWII armies like Russians, British and Japanese to the mix. Additional scenarios will have you fighting WWII again all over the globe. The system that Memoir’44 uses has been exported to many different era’s and once the system is learned additional games by multiple companies will have you fighting battles all over the world and throughout the history of warfare.