Naturelich Games

A sample Random Destination Ticket by Silverpenny. Ticket to Ride is publsihed by Days of Wonder and designed Alan R. Moon.

Already a little while ago, Silverpenny developed a random ticket variant for Ticket to Ride (Zug um Zug).

Preparation
In this variant two new destination decks are added to the game. Each new destination deck gets a different color, e.g. red and blue. Write the name of each city on the original Ticket to Ride map on one card of each color. The combination of different red and a blue tickets will be used to create new random destinations.

Modified rules
The following modifications are required to the existing rules.
At the start of the game, each player receives six destination cards:

• 3 from the original stack


• 3 red and 3 blue cards that need to be combined into at least two Random Destination Tickets

As a result, each player will hold nine cards. The red and blue cards need to be combined to Random Destination Tickets according to the following rules:

• A Random Destination Ticket (RDT) has to consist of both a red and a blue city.


• An RDT must consist of two different, non-adjacent cities. (e.g. Denver - Salt Lake City is not a valid RDT as the cities are directly next to each other on the map)


• Players may not form the same RDT twice in the same game (e.g. Player A pairs an RDT with a red Boston card and a blue Duluth card. This player draws the blue Boston and the red Duluth card. This combination cannot be used to build another RDT)


• Multiple tickets using the same city are acceptable (e.g. The RDT Dallas blue / Montreal red and the RDT Dallas red and Toronto blue are permitted).

At the beginning of the game, the player must combine and keep at least two RDTs. The player may keep all three.

During the game, players may draw additional destination tickets during their turn to form additional RDTs. This is done by drawing the top three cards from the blue and red deck. The player must form and keep at least one valid RDT from these six. It is permitted to keep two or three RDTs.

Unused red and blue cards are placed in two separate discard piles. When the ticket decks are exhausted, the dicard piles are reshuffled and placed back on the table to replenish the original piles.

Valid RDT combinations are kept hidden from all other players until the end of the game. However, once an RDT is formed it may not be altered. Thus, these pairs of red and blue should be put on the table very visibly.

Scoring
Each RDT is worth victory points. The number of victory points is calculated by counting the shortest route connecting the two cities. At the end of the game, players will add the ticket value to their score if the RDT is completed. Otherwise (i.e. if the route is not complete, or if the route is invalid), the victory points are subtracted from the player's score.

Variants
This variant can easily be adjusted, based upon the competitive nature of the players. Silverpenny also suggests a couple of variants for the RDT variant:

• Three ticket variant: Each player must form and retain a total of three valid tickets from their initial three potential ticket pairs and may not discard any red/vlue destination cards.
• Four destination card variant: When drawing destination cards during play to form additional Tickets, the player only receives two cards from the red/blue destination deck.

The full rules are available for download at BoardGameGeek. Click here to download. In addition, BoardGameGeek and Silverpenny have provided a full set of destination cards here.

Note, this variant is currently the only way to play this map of Italy for which no custom destination tickets had been developed. Thanks to Jean PAYET for pointing this out.