In Days of Wonder’s Ticket to Ride: Europe 15th Anniversary, you are train enthusiasts and collectors trying to score as many points as possible by creating train routes between cities. Each route is a single color of train on the board and segments per route. Your job is to collect train cards of a single color and have enough cards to complete routes. The added challenge is that you have destination tickets, which link multiple routes between cities and provide more points.

Game Components

In Ticket to Ride: Europe 15th Anniversary, components are pretty high quality and nicely detailed. Each player gets their tin of plastic trains, which is way cool. Cards are better quality than other games we have recently played. While complex and designed, the trains are not as highly detailed as we’d like to see for a game at this price point, but they still look cool. The board is much larger than the original Ticket to Ride: Europe. It takes up most of our 48″ square table.

Game Setup

Ticket to Ride: Europe 15th Anniversary is a reasonably easy game to set up. We only needed a few minutes, and we were ready to go. The most tedious part was counting out 45 train cars the first time we played. Once we realized there were 48 cars in each tin, that made setup much faster!! Other than that, Players only need to shuffle and deal cards, and you are ready to get started!

Game Play

The gameplay is no different than regular Ticket to Ride: Europe. However, they have added the Europa 1912, Big Cities, and the Max expansions (basically extra destination tickets) to make the cost of the game much more worth your while.

The gameplay, as mentioned above, involves creating routes between cities by discarding train cards that match the color of the route on the board. Each player also has Destination Ticket cards that have two destinations on them. If you complete the shown route by the time the game ends, you get the points associated with the card. If you don’t complete the route, you must deduct those points from your final score. Overall, these are the same rules as regular Ticket to Ride.

What makes Ticket to Ride: Europe different is the addition of Ferries and Tunnels. These additions are an added challenge because both require you to have specific cards in your hand when you want to complete either, but in the case of Tunnels, you don’t know which cards you need! (Tunnels require you to turn over three cards in the deck, and if any cards are matching the color of the tunnel route, you need to play extra cards from your hand to match)

The other cool element of this game is the Train Stations. In this 15th Anniversary edition, they are accurate 3D models of train stations. The thing about train stations is they allow you to use one of your opponent’s routes, as your own, leading from the city. Train stations help when you need a route your opponent has already claimed to help you complete your tickets.

Overall Impressions

The challenge in this game is really about the strategy of which routes you create. The cards dictate the decision to make a route in your hand and the destination tickets. The question comes up then, do I pick up more train cards? or add more destination tickets? Remember, if you fail to complete a destination ticket, you lose those points! The game is well balanced from the “risk vs. reward” perspective. For instance, near the end of one of our review playthroughs, I had completed my tickets. Instead of taking more tickets, I decided to complete a six-segment tunnel for 21 points! That’s as many points as one of the Long route tickets! Maybe I should play a game with one destination ticket and randomly put down the longest segments. I’d wonder if I’d win that way!

This game isn’t perfect, though. If I had one complaint, it would be the quality of the plastic trains. To be sure, they look good, but they still feel a bit lacking in detail that I’ve come to expect. That said, it’s only a slight knock to an enjoyable game. Other than that, this was our first Ticket to Ride game, and we were a bit skeptical that we’d enjoy it. We are not huge competitive board gamers and prefer cooperative games. The fact there is no direct competition in the game makes this an excellent game that we’ll get back to our table soon!

What we Love

• The detail of the game board, the tins the trains come in, and the overall quality in really good.
• The game feels well balanced and would make for a great Family Game Night!
• We love the addition of Ferries and Tunnels. They add an extra bit of strategy to a fun game.

What could be better

• The quality of the actual train pieces is good, but not great. I feel like we were plaining with inexpensive dollar store trains… The fact that each player has unique trains is cool, though. Just the quality could be a bit better

If you are interested in this game, we do sell it in our store! Check it out here!