Board game publisher Days of Wonder dropped an unnecessarily momentous teaser trailer for an upcoming project on its Instagram on Tuesday, and it looks like a Ticket to Ride Legacy board game. The trailer presents a few scant details about the project – including the involvement of key legacy game designers – with all the bombast of an historical blockbuster.
Ticket to Ride is one of the best board games of all time, and the breakout success that made Days of Wonder’s name. To a backdrop of stirring orchestral music and footage of steam trains riding the great plains of America, the teaser confirms that Alan R. Moon, the original designer of Ticket to Ride, is attached to the project.
Rob Daviau, who invented the legacy game format with Risk Legacy, is also listed in the teaser, along with Matt Leacock. Leacock designed similar smash hit Pandemic, and Leacock and Daviau’s collaboration on Pandemic Legacy popularised the legacy board game format.
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The legacy format – in which players permanently change the game’s board, components, and rules as they complete games – is a good thematic fit for Ticket to Ride. It’s set during the great age of steam: imagine if you were not just journeying along routes, but constructing them as you go?
I’ll be watching this one closely. Ticket to Ride has been around for almost twenty years, but it remains an incredibly strong design; simple enough that it makes a perfect gateway game to introduce to non-gamers, but with serious scope for mastery and ruthless competitive play.
It’s also a very flexible design. Ticket to Ride: Germany and map expansions like Asia or Heart of Africa turn it into a fantastic two player board game or couples board game, while the simplified Ticket To Ride: First Journey is a fantastic kids board game that I regularly play with my daughter. All that gives me hope that it’ll keep its charm and identity after making the jump to the legacy format.