Tips tickettoride

In Ticket To Ride, you want to collect as many points as possible, while reducing your opponent's opportunity to collect points.

You collect points in three ways:

1. Build railroads
   a. Each railroad segment you build earns 1-15 points.
   b. Longer railroads are worth significantly more points than shorter railroads
2. Complete tickets
   a. Each ticket requires you to connect two cities before the game ends. The greater the distance between cities, the more points you get.
   b. Tickets are risky! If the game ends before you connect the cities, you lose points equal to the ticket's value.
3. Earn the longest railroad prize (10 points)

You can limit your opponent's ability to collect points in two ways:

1. End the game earlier
   a. The game ends when you have two railroad cars remaining. The fewer turns it takes to use up your cars, the more control you have over the end time.
   b. To avoid being caught off guard by an early game end, keep watch on the number of cars and color cards in your opponents' hands
2. Block their path
   a. Building railroads early may allow you to claim your preferred routes, leaving your opponent to take inconvenient detours
   b. To avoid being blocked, identify critical choke points in your route, and claim them early
   c. Many players consider deliberate blocking (when you take a segment that interferes with your opponent without actually 

helping you) to be unsporting.

--- More advanced tips ---

A. Choose tickets wisely

   - Complete your tickets: it's worth double the official point value, because of the points you lose if you don't complete it
   - Try to get tickets with nearby start and end points. Make sure you can join up all of the required cities with your 45 train cars (leaving plenty of spare for detours)
   - If you successfully complete a big coast-to-coast route (e.g. NY-LA or Seattle-Miami), you may be able to draw many more tickets and add them on easily
   - Drawing tickets late in the game, when you have little time to adapt your route to an inconvenient one, is risky

B. Longer routes are better than shorter ones

   - You get more points per train car 
   - You can reach your destination in fewer turns

C. Rainbow cards are powerful

   - Use rainbow cards to:
     - Complete longer routes for more points (e.g. a 6-car route with only 5 matching cards)
     - Alter your route flexibly (to detour around your opponent, or extend your route to collect new tickets)
     - End the game faster (helping you use up odd color cards, instead of having to draw more)
   - Normally, you can only take 1 rainbow card instead of 2 regular cards. However, if you draw frequently from the face-down deck, you will likely get some rainbows for "free".

D. Choose your timing wisely

   - If you were playing Ticket to Ride solo, you would wait until the very end of the game to build, when you had drawn all the color cards and tickets you wanted and knew exactly where to go and how to get there
   - In a real game with opponents, you face a challenging choice:
     - Commit to a path too soon, and expect to be frustrated when you don't draw the correct color cards to complete it later
     - Build too late, and your opponent may lay claim to critical routes and block you (or worse, end the game before you build!)

--- Less Advanced Tips ---

You only have 45 trains. Generally speaking, that means you can only go Horizontally across the country ONCE and Vertically once. If you're super clean about the route you can go Vertically twice, but that means there's zero waste or detours.

For reference, Los Angeles to Vancouver to Montreal to Miami is 44 trains if you hit the absolutely most efficient route. (Exact same count for the Southern route). Any detour that makes the train more than 1 car longer and the whole route is impossible.

Destination cards are important! Generally speaking, you need be able to claim at least 40 Destination points at the end of the game to be competitive, but 50+ is the winner's average.