Ticket to Ride Reviews

Ticket to Ride used to be our favorite family online game, especially because we don’t all live in the same state. Unfortunately, the recent update changed all that. With the older version it was very easy to “see” and choose routes. The new game has pastel colors that run together making it extremely difficult to see the contrast between routes. Who cares about choosing the type of locomotive when we are constantly having to look for which color and route we are on because they are so difficult to follow due to the lack of contrast. The other aspect we don’t like is how quickly the points are counted based on the number of tickets we have made. It’s hard to keep track of the route(s) and see what we’ve done before, during and after because of this update. The board is way too busy and that combined with the lighter colored cards, board and trains makes it almost impossible to keep track of our cards, routes and progress. In a nutshell, it’s no longer fun, so none of play anymore. I’m only writing to find out if there is a way to revert to the older version which we all enjoyed.

I want a refund. This “update” of TickettoRide by Marmalde is just unbelievably bad. Somehow they’ve managed to downgrade every feature of the original, turning one of my favorite games into a useless waste of time and money. The game board is illegible, your destinations are impossible to see, the routes taken by others are equally bad, the animation is distracting, there’s no timer so you can’t tell if another player is slow or if the game has hung (and it hangs a lot!), the card colors are hard to distinguish, and the number of cards and colors in your hand is virtually unusable. Who designed this?!? And then there are the random changes they’ve made from the original, like putting your wild cards on the left of your hand rather than your right. Yes, a relatively inconsequential change, but why?!? And don’t get me started on how the game sometimes hangs and you can’t even swipe away from it—you actually have to restart your phone!!! I hate having to write such a bad review—but this game is absolutely NOT WORTH BUYING! In fact, it wouldn’t be worth it even if it was free. AVOID.

I was so excited for the new version of this game to come out, because the old version stopped working on my phone. The new version is such a disappointment. First of all let’s start with the fact that I have been kicked out of games multiple times and unable to rejoin. When I attempt to rejoin all I see is the map of the US. I was playing a game, and my sister was one of the other players, after multiple attempts to rejoin the game, I finally officially quit the game. The game continued waiting, after I quit, for me to take my turn. Then there are the many times that the game has just frozen.

Now let’s talk about the game itself. Why isn’t there a clock? There is a time limit on the game, but no clock to tell players how much time is left in each players time. This is an important aspect of the game. Then there is the board. You can barely tell when someone places trains down, if they place a train down of the same color as the line. It makes it very confusing and difficult at times.

Overall this version of the game is awful and I’m not sure why anyone would want to buy it until the bugs have been worked out. Honestly there was nothing’s wrong with the old version, so I’m not sure why the need for a new one except to make more money.

My husband and I had the previous app with all the expansions that were paid for. Having to buy them all over again because Days of Wonder combined with Asmodee games is a rip off and frankly wrong. It is not the consumers fault and this not the only game. Splendor is no longer supported either. So, I guess when you buy an app it’s not a promise of always having access to what you paid for. I am not impressed with the new format and all the additional up-charges. Also, the trains are horribly hard to see on the board and there is less of the TTR feel to the layout.
I saw on another post someone else expressing the same frustration (not my spouse) and they were kindly offered the Europe map for free by
Marmalade Games, the new platform provider. It was kind because this was never their fault as Asmodee and Days of Wonder went a different direction with platform providers, but it still doesn’t account for the amounts spent previously or for the additional amounts to be spent for the same/similar product. Asmodee and Days of Wonder should be held accountable for this.

They took a great game and app and utterly destroyed it with this remake. The new board is awful. Half the space is taken up by filler maps of Mexico and Canada. There is a weird and unnecessary perspective on the board. The contrast is terrible, so you can barely make out yellow from orange or the grays of the board from the black of the cars. There’s no rankings. No map variations anymore. Instead of showing you what trail you’ve completed, you get a useless animation. It’s impossible to keep track of routes. There are gigantic pins on the map that take away even more visibility of the map. It’s basically like someone wanted to make things look pretty with no concept of user interface. The old maps worked great for over a decade. I don’t know why they felt the need to rehaul it. What happened is they took a great game and ruined it. This looks like it was made by developers who have never actually play TTR on an iPad, or at all, for that matter. I just can’t get over how bad a remake TickettoRide is. Why bring it to TickettoRide Store when you have none of the features of the previous version?

As of Ver 1.0.18 I have been unable to complete a online multiplayer game. Generally you set it up for 4-5 players generally game play seem to be going ok, but before you even reach the halfway point in game play, a player will freeze up and at that point there is nothing you can do, it’s game over. I have tried various things like waiting it out, killing TickettoRide and then going back in. When a player freezes up it’s game over there is nothing you can do to fix it. Very frustrating!!

Ticket to ride is a great game. I’m sure that you had all sorts of reasons for redesigning it from the ground up rather than just updating the existing game. Here is a little hint: When you have a large online game community that like your game and regularly plays it, before you completely drop support for the current version that actually did work, and release a new version that is untested and doesn’t work, you should pause and ask yourself “is this a good idea”? I think any sane person would answer this question “no, this a terrible idea, let’s not do that to our loyal customers.

I downloaded TickettoRide as a replacement for another Ticket to Ride app that closed its servers today. I enjoyed that app because the colors were not super saturated and were easy to look at. TickettoRide is very hard for me to play and results in a migraine after playing just one game.
I understand that bright colors and animations can keep some players attention but I would suggest that the developers add an accessibility switch in the settings if they are not going to change the regular game. Toggling this switch would lower the saturation of the cards and the board and disable the animations on the board. I would also have it disable the round animations when a route is complete, and limit the change in average value of the screen when train cars are being placed. I think most players understand which routes are playable with the cards they have and do not need the entire screen to darken except for the routes they can play. I am interested in purchasing and playing all of the map expansions, however it seems like a bad investment unless TickettoRide is changed to make it possible for me to play. I would be happy to provide more specific feedback to the developers if it is desired.

Last couple releases by Marmalade have really missed the mark… like what on earth is going on over there. You all started off strong!

It’s too bad too because I was so excited for this release. Other people have said it, but this game is visually a nightmare. It’s very challenging to see what’s going - especially once the trains get out there, I’m straining to see what lines are open. The “perspective view” is working against the visuals and the detail on the landscape is a lot visually too. The menus are not the most intuitive (why a separate lobby for async, what if I want to track a friend - not public - and play async with them?). The playable characters are sort of strange brand add- it would honestly be better not having characters at all.

The whole thing is just disappointing. and the worst part of all….? The previous app was SO GOOD. Granted, it was getting old, but they really understood what players wanted. It feels like Marmalade really doesn’t understand their audience and their needs. Really too bad cause Ticket to Ride is such a great game.

I had the original Ticket to Ride, which became Ticket to Ride Classic, which is now obsolete. Towards the end of the lifespan of that particular game, it became so glitchy that you could never make it through an entire game without freezing up or being booted out a bunch of times. Unfortunately, whoever took over and started the new app has not figured out how to fix that problem. This game continues to be just as glitchy, and continues to freeze up and kick you out constantly. In addition, this particular version of TickettoRide does not have some of the best features of the previous version. There is no rating/ranking system. I am getting used to the pastel colors that others have commented on. If you can ever actually get a game to make it to completion, it is a fun game (if you like the board game.) But unfortunately that almost never happens in online play. I cannot figure out why developers cannot figure this particular game out. There are billions of apps of different games and most of them work on a fairly consistent basis. This one does not work… which is frustrating because it has potential!

The Day of Wonder version of TickettoRide is much easier to read/place your trains on. This map sometimes you have to zoom in as close as possible and move very slowly to get the west coast shorter routes to register, which while not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things is definitely annoying. The timer for turns feels unnecessary, I’m not sure if there’s a way to turn it off yet. Otherwise, I will continue to play due to reliable connectivity when paying with friends (while this feature is not terribly intuitive to access, it easier to access and more reliable than the Days of Wonder app).

Also, TickettoRide makes it much easier to connect with others on different types of phones at both close (same house same WiFi) and far (cross country) than the Days of Wonder app allows.

Ultimately, it gets the job done better than any other/previous version and that’s nice.

Review Part 2 and Update from my original review. I downgraded the overall rating from 4 stars to 3. TickettoRide continues to suffer from frequent hang ups and anomalies relative to game starts, ends and score keeping playing online with others. The games Leaderboard, which tracks current and past wins and rankings stopped working completely in TickettoRide 's Season 8 after only 3 games of play at the beginning of the Season. The frequent crashes and hang ups coupled with the Leaderboard issue make the game for the most part unplayable. I've submitted my concerns to Marmalade Games, who do respond almost immediately stating updates are forthcoming. The updates come but with little effect for a solution to the Leaderboard problems. TickettoRide game is playable but without proper means for scoring, is useless to most gamers. One would think after 8 months of multiplayer online play these issues would be resolved. Before you buy, think twice about playing online against anyone other than a "Bot" in the solo games.

EDIT: After getting the regular build, things seem to be much better but I still run into this annoying bug where sometimes you drop a route but the game instead of using the route for your turn instead draws a card and the cards you are trying to drop as the route just keep hanging there. Your turn finishes and in the next turn the “flying” cards drop back down in your deck. Basically you lost a turn for no reason. This needs fixing as this keeps repeatedly happening and you have to quit the game.

Lets be honest - the development build sold for $4.99 is terrible. The game is so buggy in its current state. Game hangs sometimes when it’s starting sometimes in the middle of games. The UI still works then but no progress on the game until you reload. The dropping of trains on to the mall sometimes just does nothing, it is very random and keeps wasting time so Blitz version is unplayable. I am willing to give it time and revise this review should they fix the bugs.

Definitely quite a bit of work to get back to where we were with the old app, but hopefully we’ll get there soon. Top annoyances: (1) Colors still not the right contrast. In the old app I can tell immediately what’s a train car and what’s track of a given color. Hard to make out at a glance for almost all the colors. Shadows or skews or better colors or all would help. (2) No 1910 for usa. There’s a reason 1910 is popular. The base game does not encourage destination draws. (3) If I press on a train card in my hand and drag it, why on earth would the pointer be under my finger?? You need to offset to a reasonable vertical position. I can’t see where I’m placing it. Do you even test it yourselves? (4) Would be nice for the score summary to show which bonuses applied for each player. (5) This might be the biggest one and what prevents me from telling any of my friends to get it: offline (wifi/bluetooth) mode. We like to get together and play from our devices. I guess we will keep using the old app for now for that. No reason to get this new one. Plus we have all the maps in Classic.

Let me start by saying how much that both myself and my fiancé love this game. I previously owned the other one 2 years ago but that was discontinued. Recently we downloaded this version and bought the expansion packs that were available . We normally play against each other and really enjoy this as kinda “quiet time “ with one another enjoying each others company . These past two days when playing against one another the game has frozen and booted me from the game. I had originally thought that it may be a WiFi issue so I disconnected WiFi and proceeded to go back to the game utilizing the “my games” tab. That seemed to temporarily fix it however it happened again when not on WiFi. The issue that prompted me to write this was that after an additional hour of play my fiancé had the same issue. Any ideas why this happened? At the very least I felt that I should alert you in case that it’s an ongoing issue. I would also like to see additional expansion other than the two that I have purchased.

Thank you,
Allen Hill

Played the other TTR app for years with friends. Came over to this one when the other shut down. To reiterate common complaints: the colors are BAD for this board and there is no definition of what is a track and what is played trains. To play with friends, you have to play the “online with friends” which operates under the assumption that all players will be online the whole time for the game. They all have to be online to accept the invite or the game will show that it’s ended. The game will give no notifications that it’s someone else’s turn. The game will not tell you who won at the end unless you are online when it ends. There is an “async” version that contemplates the players being offline…but I could find no option to invite your friends. Be warned if you want to play with friends. If you want to play by yourself, see if you can get the other, far superior TTR app.

I previously reviewed this at 2 stars when it first came out. From color issues, to screen display, to animation scenes, to periodic crashing… it needed a lot of improvement. TickettoRide just did not seem refined. However, I have given it a try again recently, and they have done a great job addressing nearly all the issues. I am seriously happy and impressed. Colors are a lot better to look at, they have added black outline to the edges of train tracks, and boards giving TickettoRide a more appealing look and the animation of zooming in and out has gone away which is kind of nice. My only critique would be I wish I could play with the expansions when playing with friends who don’t have the expansion. I think it would be an awesome way to advertise the new boards and get more people interested in purchasing the expansions. But all in all, the developers are doing a great job fixing the bugs and issues and I am looking forward to playing TTR more now!

This game is so addictive and has lots of potential. For this, I did buy the early bird pack to support updates to the play because it has some bugs that need to be fixed asap. Primarily, the issue with the game dealing incorrect cards or not letting you place train cars on the board. Marmalade, I have a screen recording if you want it.

In my last game play, I tried several times to place 6 yellow train cars on the board, but it always dealt me cards from the deck when I hit the check,ark to place the cars.

Another issue I had in that same game was it dealing incorrect cards. I would choose maybe a white card at the very top of the 5 face up card options, but instead it dealt from the deck. Other times I would choose a certain color card, say green, and was give a different color. Mind you, it didn’t matter the color I choose, it just didn’t deal the correct color. The wild thing was sometimes it dealt a color from the face up pile that wasn’t even a current face up colored card, so it’s not as if your finger may have tapped too high or too low and it dealt the neighboring card. No, it just dealt a random color card instead.

Please fix these bugs asap. I lost several areas of the board simply because the game has these bugs. This game will be so awesome if/ when these issues are resolved.

I am reviewing again since I first played the new version. I did not like the graphics. They did change them so it’s a little better now. I still like the old version better. I also don’t like that there doesn’t seem to be a reason to play other than to just play. Now when I play, I either win or lose, and it’s over. Before, I was trying to rank higher. There is no ranking anymore. So I don’t seem to have an incentive to win other than to win. I miss the karma scale and being able to play other ranked players. It just seems like the game went backwards. I don’t understand why you messed with a good thing. It was my favorite game. I don’t look forward to playing as much as I used to. Also, I miss all the other maps that I paid extra money for. Honestly, I feel like when they came out with a new version. The people who already owned it shouldn’t have had to pay again. I feel like maybe it was just to make more money.

TickettoRide went from the most disappointing launch I’ve ever experienced for gameplay to a real pleasure now. I’ve been playing at my regular pace and enjoy the new leader boards, the gameplay, the visibility, and all the other things I have been complaining about that have now been fixed. I like fast play and I appreciate blitz mode with the functional countdown timer clock. If you were one of the early adopters and were highly disappointed, I would suggest trying the game again. I would have given this game negative stars if it were possible at launch. For me, I can put up with a few gameplay glitches or some additions that get bugs worked out of a new release. But when this game was first launched, the colors were so terrible, actually the whole graphics scheme was awful, that it made the game incredibly painful to play. and the game was not pleasant to navigate on iPad. There had been touchscreen issues, zooming issues many other broken things. The game developer has worked to answer all of the objections. Thank you! thank you!

I’m a long time fan of the board game and own almost every expansion. I wanted so bad to get it for tablet, but held off due to all the reviews saying the graphics were painful and the turn prompter infuriating. Well, I finally downloaded this based on the latest reviews saying all that was fixed, and I’m here to confirm it’s true! TickettoRide is now everything a board game port should be — faithful to the original in appearance and style, with added QOL features that only a digital version can provide. The game looks beautiful, plays fast and flawlessly, and allows the player to choose the map, the ruleset, the route set, even the look of your train pieces! I was overjoyed to find my favorite maps already available, including Nordic, India, and Europe (all card sets). Even the original U.S. map, which was ugly as sin in the board game, is alive and pretty here. Most of all, TickettoRide absolutely delivers the board game experience, with frosting on top 😊 And that includes single player. It is genuinely heartwarming to see a developer paying such serious attention to prior complaints and making everything right. Boy, did they. If you love Ticket to Ride, TickettoRide has it all. Hesitate to download no more!