Trains

Ticket to Ride: First Journey takes the gameplay of the Ticket to Ride series and scales it down for a younger audience.

In general, players collect train cards, claim routes on the map, and try to connect the cities shown on their tickets. In more detail, the game board shows a map of the United States with certain cities being connect by colored paths. Each player starts with four colored train cards in hand and two tickets; each ticket shows two cities, and you're trying to connect those two cities with a contiguous path of your trains in order to complete the ticket.

On a turn, you either draw two train cards from the deck or discard train cards to claim a route between two cities; for this latter option, you must discard cards matching the color and number of spaces on that route (e.g., two yellow cards for a yellow route that's two spaces long). If you connect the two cities shown on a ticket with a path of your trains, reveal the ticket, place it face up in front of you, then draw a new ticket. (If you can't connect cities on either ticket because the paths are blocked, you can take your entire turn to discard those tickets and draw two new ones.)

If you connect one of the West Coast cities to one of the East Coast cities with a path of your turns, you immediately claim a Coast-to-Coast ticket.

The first player to complete six tickets wins! Alternatively, if someone has placed all twenty of their trains on the game board, then whoever has completed the most tickets wins!

String Railway is a unique train game that consists of colored strings, tokens, station tiles, and a board for scoring. To set up, first place the string tied in a big circle on the table to establish the field area for the game. Next, place a small circle of string to represent mountains and a line of string to represent a river. Finally, place the main stations for each player equal distances apart from one another.

On a turn, you draw and place a station tile, then try to place a railroad string between your stations in an effort to connect them in order to form your own train network. Connected stations earn victory points (VPs).

After five turns, the game ends and the player with the most VPs wins.

Everybunny knows that rabbits love the countryside — and carrots, of course! The best carrots of all grow between the train tracks, but you have to keep an eye out for trains! Roll the dice and hop your rabbit to the best carrot patch; as long as you don't need to flee out of the path of the train, you can happily nibble away. Chomp, chomp, chomp...

In Karnickel, each player places his rabbit on the circular train track made of eight interchangeable tiles, sets the train engine on its start space, then takes turns rolling the custom dice. After you roll, set any die that shows the "train" out of play, then count up how many times each of the player colors appears on the remaining dice; you must move one of the rabbits (yours or another player's) clockwise around the track the full number of spaces. You then pass the rabbit dice to the next player. Players take turns, each time rolling only the dice passed to them and hopping the rabbits from tile to tile, trying to land on the tiles where they will be able to collect the most carrots.

When a player rolls only trains, the rabbit hopping has to stop as the train is ready to move! That player rerolls all seven dice, counts up the number of trains rolled, then moves the train that many spaces around the track. Every rabbit on a tile that the train moves through is scared away by the engine and hops off the track, failing to collect any carrots this time. All rabbits still on the track after the train moves — either because the train didn't reach them or because they were on one of the two tunnel tiles — get to grab 1, 2 or 3 carrots...or maybe lose one — exploding carrots are a risk!

Everyone then hops back onto the track, and the next player rolls all the dice to start a new round of play. Whoever has the most carrots when one player has at least eight carrots wins!

It is the height of the Steam Age and the whistle of the Iron Horse harkens the boom of small towns across the country into major hubs of transportation and economic growth.

In Trains and Stations, a new take on train games, players must make deliveries, develop buildings, and profit from their decisions while working with and against other players. Will you focus on establishing mining operations in an attempt to gain a monopoly on coal, silver, and gold? Or perhaps you will focus on laying tracks across the landscape and helping other players move their goods—taking your cut, of course. Every game will evolve differently with unique twists and turns as you control the movement of goods across the game map!

Alvin & Dexter – A Ticket to Ride Monster Expansion can be added to any of the various standalone Ticket to Ride games that designer Alan R. Moon and publisher Days of Wonder have released since 2004.

These monsters stymie players both during the game and once it ends. During play, no routes can be built into or out of a city where Alvin or Dexter are currently nesting, and during the final score tallying, any destination ticket showing a city where either monster stands is worth only half its normal value.

Desperately need to build a route to Seattle, Paris, or wherever else a roaming monster has set up shop? Discard one (or two) wild locomotive cards, and you can move the monster up to three (or six) cities away from its current location. Move a monster more than any other player, and you'll pick up an endgame bonus for your role as monster minder.