1868 - 1871: Expanding Rules, Expanding Map

 In a lot of ways Legacy Games are like video games. In the first level of a video game you learn the basic rules. Then slowly, as new levels are added, you learn more and more rules until you end up being a semi-expert of a very complex system. As Cathy and I continued our journey through Legends of the West, the complexity ramped up.

There's a lot of upkeep here for a Ticket to Ride game. The weight has gone from light to medium just in the first few rounds as stickers are continuously added to the rulebook. Cards are being introduced and retired from play at a fast clip. All of the sudden we are tracking Employees and postcards and Company Towns. Ticket to Ride can be a stressful game when you aren't sure if you are going to complete all of your routes before your opponent lays down her last train. The stress is ramped up when you are trying to juggle new strategies coming down the track with every play-through.

This is certainly a unique Ticket to Ride game, but as we work our way through it, I notice some basic elements missing from other maps in the franchise. For starters, there is no score track. You don't get points for individual routes. Short routes are worth the same as longer routes and you only score bonuses when your claimed route matches your player color. Looking at the map, almost every route color correlates to a player color. There are no orange or purple routes and the white and grey paths are the only ones that are neutral. Well... that would be true in a five player game. Cathy and I are playing two players, which makes me wonder if this game is more serviceable to a higher player count. 

At the end of 1868 the winner of the round (me) was asked to pick one region to expand into. I selected the Great Plains region hoping for some Wisconsin stations (no such luck there, but Minnesota gets two). Cathy and I were then instructed to add stickers to the game board. I know that this is a feature of most legacy games, but it seems sacrilege to permanently change our map. As the playing field expands westward I can already tell that it's going to end up covered in Christmas colors, as Cathy and I lay claim to the western frontier. Without blue, yellow, or black teams, those stickers will be absent from our finished map. All of this has me thinking I should purchase a second copy of the game in case I want to play through with 4 or 5 players next time.

And yet we are not the only forces in this campaign. Mama O'Connell is running her own network of trains and something tells me that her own stickers are going to start challenging us in interesting ways.

Next time: 1874