Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 4 – Nederland Days of Wonder

Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 4 – Nederland contains a new game board with new rules for use with Ticket to Ride or Ticket to Ride: Europe with players now creating train lines in the Netherlands.

The basic gameplay remains the same as always – players collect train cards in order to claim routes between pairs of cities with the overall goal of completing tickets they hold in hand, but Ticket to Ride: Nederland twists this gameplay in two ways. First, nearly every route on the game board is a double-route, with two tracks connecting cities. Both of these routes are in play no matter how many players are in the game.

Second, every route – whether double or single – has a bridge toll that a player must pay when building on that route. On a single route or the first track of a double route, the player pays this toll, which costs 1-4 coins, to the bank. On the second track of a double route, the player pays this toll to the player who built the first track. Players start the game with 30 coins, and if you can’t pay a toll, you must take a loan card to cover the fare, with each loan costing you 5 points at the end of the game.

In addition to helping you avoid loans, coins matter because at game’s end, players receive a bonus based on how many coins they hold relative to everyone else. In a five-player game, for example, the player with the most coins scores a 55 point bonus; the 2nd place player scores 35 points, and the other players 20, 10 and 0 points. If you’ve taken a loan, however, you’re ineligible for this bonus scoring, so players have an incentive to build early and often.

These coin bonuses are balanced by the multitude of destination tickets with large point values: six of them are worth 29+ points while another seventeen are worth 17-26 points.