How to play Ticket to Ride

Ticket to Ride is a route-claiming game by Alan R. Moon in which you collect colored train-car cards, spend them to claim railway routes across a map of the United States, and quietly work to complete secret destination tickets connecting distant cities. The rules fit on a single page, yet the tension of watching an opponent snap up the one route you desperately need gives the game a sharp, competitive edge.

Each turn you do exactly one of three things — draw cards, claim a route, or draw new destination tickets — so every decision is clear but never trivial. The race to build the longest continuous path while keeping your incomplete tickets hidden from rivals makes each game feel like a different puzzle.

Never played a set-collection game? The engine underneath is just this: routes are priced in matching colored cards — a 4-space green route costs 4 green cards — so most turns you're patiently banking cards toward a purchase, and the drama is timing. Draw one turn too long and a rival claims the route first; buy one turn too early and you've tipped your hand about where your tickets go. That push-and-pull is the whole game, and it's learnable in five minutes.

What's in the box, and what each piece does at the table:

• 1 board map — North American train routes: each colored row of spaces is a claimable route between two adjacent cities, and the scoring track runs around the border. Some city pairs are joined by double routes; with 2–3 players only one of the pair may be used.
• 240 plastic train cars (45 per player in blue, red, green, yellow, and black, plus spares) — your working stock. Claiming a route physically fills it with your trains, and your dwindling pile is the game clock: the end triggers when someone drops to 2 or fewer.
• 110 train car cards (12 each of eight colors, plus 14 Locomotives) — the currency. Each route demands as many matching-color cards as it has spaces; Locomotives are wild and stand in for any color.
• 30 destination ticket cards — your secret missions: two cities and a point value. Connect them with an unbroken chain of your own routes to score it; fail and you subtract those same points at the end.
• 1 Longest Continuous Path bonus card — a visible 10-point trophy, sitting beside the board all game, for the longest unbroken chain of one player's trains.
• 5 wooden scoring markers (one per player color) — advance immediately along the border track every time a route is claimed, so the public score is always on display; ticket points stay hidden until the end.
• 1 rules summary card — a turn reference to pass around the table on your first plays (recent printings also toss in a couple of Days of Wonder promo cards).

Play proceeds clockwise, each player taking exactly one of these three actions per turn:

1. Draw train cards. Take 2 cards, each either from the 5 face-up cards or blind from the top of the deck (mix freely); every face-up card taken is replaced immediately. A face-up Locomotive counts as your entire draw — if you take one, you get no second card, and you may not take a face-up Locomotive as your second card either. (A Locomotive drawn blind is just one lucky card; you still draw two.) There is no hand limit.
2. Claim a route. Discard a set of same-colored cards equal to the route's length, place your plastic trains on every space, and immediately advance your scoring marker: routes score 1/2/4/7/10/15 points for lengths 1–6 — longer routes pay disproportionately more. Locomotives mix into any set as any color. Gray routes accept any single color of your choice. You may claim any open route anywhere — it needn't touch your network — but only one route per turn, and never both halves of a double route (with 2–3 players, once one half is claimed the other is closed to everyone).
3. Draw destination tickets. Draw 3 tickets from the destination deck and keep at least 1; return the rest face-down to the bottom of the deck. Completed tickets add their points at the end — kept-but-unfinished ones subtract.

If three Locomotives ever sit face-up at once, all five offer cards are discarded and replaced. When the train-card deck runs out, reshuffle the discards into a new one.

A lap of the table. Ana takes a face-up blue card and a blind card from the deck. Beto discards three blue cards to claim the 3-space Montréal–New York route, places three of his trains on it, and moves his marker 4 points. Carla takes a face-up Locomotive — that's her whole turn. Diego, whose last ticket is nearly finished, gambles on momentum: he draws 3 new destination tickets, keeps the one that rides his existing network, and slips the other two under the deck.

When any player's train supply drops to 2 or fewer pieces at the end of their turn, every player — including that one — takes one final turn, and the game ends. Route points are already on the track; now reveal destination tickets:

• Add the printed point value of every ticket you completed.
• Subtract the printed point value of every ticket you failed to complete.
• Award 10 bonus points for the longest continuous path of a single player's trains — loops and revisited cities are fine, but each train may be counted only once per path; all tied players score the full bonus.

The player with the most total points wins. Ties are broken by most completed destination tickets, and then by whoever holds the Longest Path bonus card.

Strategically, claim contested routes early — a blocked route can strand a whole ticket. Don't overcommit to new tickets late in the game; an unfinished ticket is a guaranteed point loss. And keep the longest-path bonus in view — even a modest lead in connected trains can swing a close finish.