In Ticket to Ride you are trying to link destinations around America/Europe/The world/specific location together by building train tracks/ship lanes/taxi routes linking them. You have tickets that tell you which destinations you need to link together. This is done by collecting coloured cards then using those cards to lay claim to the appropriately coloured routes. If a route has 3 red spaces then you need 3 red cards in order to claim it.
On your turn you can do one of 4 things – take 2 of the 5 face up train cards (unless you’ve chosen a rainbow card, in which case you can only take that), take 2 train cards from the top of the deck, play cards to claim a route or take a new ticket. The game ends up being very fast paced with players turns going by quickly. People can block your routes by taking the tracks you need, so you have to be careful not to telegraph clearly where you intend to go and have backup plans just in case.
Questions to explore character
1) Did you block off anyone’s route? How did it make you feel? How do you think they felt?
2) Did anyone block your route? How did it make you feel?
3) Did it take a long time to get the route cards you needed? Have you ever had to wait a long time for something you wanted? What do you do if it never comes?
4) Where in the world would you love to go? Why?
Links to Faith
As with Tsuro you can talk about Romans 14 and how your actions can inadvertently affect others. We should strive to do good things, but also realise that our definition of good may not be the same as someone else’s and we should never force our approach onto others. If someone struggles with something don’t blatantly do it in front of them!
As you play the game your actions are limited to the cards you are currently holding. It takes time to collect all the cards you need, and as you do so the route you decide to take your trains along may change. This is true of life as well as our relationship with God. It can constantly evolve as we study scripture further, attend church regularly and grow older. Moses started life as a persecuted baby, was adopted by the royal family to become a prince, became a murderer and ran away to become a shepherd in Midian before finally quite late in life God’s true plan was revealed to him and he became the saviour of the Israelites. Everything happens in God’s time.
As the game is about travelling around the world it can be used to talk about missionary work and how difficult it can be. A particularly good example could be Brother Andrew, founder of Open Doors. He smuggled scripture into Poland back when it was part of the Soviet Bloc and Christianity was outlawed at terrible risk to himself, and he founded Open Doors, a charity which still works today to take bibles and scripture into countries where being a Christian leads to persecution. Jesus told us to go out and spread the word (Mark 6:7-13) and that’s what we should do. Though some journeys are not as easy as others, and there will be placed that are hostile and try to turn us away.
Links to buy
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