Naturelich Games

Days of Wonder has released the first expansion to Ticket to Ride (German: Zug um Zug): Mystery Train. Coming as a limited edition, this expansion was available at the games fair Spiel 2004 in Essen, Germany. If one bought the game at the Days of Wonder booth (or had bought the game already, elsewhere), one was entitled to receive the expansion. Atfer the exhibition, Mystery Train is available via the Days of Wonder website.

Why Mystery Train?
Well, it was created by Alan R. Moon, game designer of Ticket to Ride, to celebrate the game being awarded the Spiel des Jahres 2004 prize and to thank customers and retailers for making TIcket to Ride such a success (to the gaming industry, the Spiel des Jahres award is what the Academy Award is to movie makers).

What are the contents of Mystery Train?
The expansion contains ten new cards bringing additional variety to the gameplay through special bonuses and action cards. Additionally, some new destination routes are introduced. Here are the details:

What are the implications for gameplay?
First of all, let me stress that the Mystery Train cards are shuffled into the destination tickets. Unfortunately, they have a different back color, than the original set and can be spotted easily.

This is a major drawback, as it interferes with a crucial game mechanism. In the original game, drawing additional destination tickets is risky business. You may be lucky and draw destinations which can be reached easily, but you may have bad luck and draw tickets which are way out of route. Thus, one would have to score minus points. Now what does the Mystery Train expansion add to that mechanism? Keep in mind, the Mystery Train destination routes are short and easy to score (if you draw them at the start of the game). And even if you can't reach those destinations one can be certain to score a maximum of 7 minus points.

In addition the positive effects of the character cards are great. The most valuable destination routes run from east coast to west coast. If you go for one of those, the Tycoon really supports this strategy well. The Engineer is worth a lot, as you can pick a destination ticket of your choice and you get to look through the entire stack of tickets. The station master is wonderful for those east-cost or mid-west routes where one has to connect cities lying rather closely together. To me, the least powerful card is the Train Condcutor, but it can have a surprising effect, if you use it as the last card to be scored and you are only 5 points behind the leading player... ;-)