20 of the Stranger Homemade Expansions for Ticket to Ride

Number 6: Ticket to Ride
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Ticket to Ride is such a simple game, even a child can flip the table when you steal their mission.  The core game comes with a map of the United States, but Days of Wonder created twenty-seven official spin-offs and expansions because people like trains.  The collective conscious that is the Internet thought that was nice, patronizingly patted Days of Wonder on the head, and churned out 115 unofficial expansions on Board Game Geek alone.  Since there are only 196 countries in the world, we’re well on our way to paving the globe in pastel choo choos.

Or we would be, if some people got their act together and stopped making expansions for states, provinces, cities, and fictional realms.  While we wait for what I know every man, woman, and child all deeply needs—a tournament of Ticket to Ride consisting of 784 players, all playing on one super-map composed of every country in the world—we must make do with a curious tour of oddball maps these jackenapes insist don’t ruin a global dream.

 

Belgium

Welcome to Belgium!  Our greatest exports are chocolate and Jean-Claude Van Damme, not in that order.  Be careful not to fall over, or you might end up in France.  If you need to travel from one side of the country to the other, politely ask the gentleman in front of you take a step to the right.  Or you can hop on Belgium’s railway system, the first completed national railway (which I presume happened when the first railway car was built in Belgium.  Enter the back of the car, walk to the front of the car, exit, and you’re at your destination.)

Alright, alright, Belgium isn’t that small.  It’s larger than my home state of Massachusetts in square kilometers.  It only looks tiny in comparison to the Texas-sized countries that surround it.  According to Google maps, you can bicycle from Antwerp to Arlon in 14 and a half hours.  That’s from dawn till dusk in the summer, with an extra thirty minutes for pit stops.  So maybe a spectacular Belgian athlete who fritters their days away, doesn’t own a passport, and possesses a strong bladder wouldn’t need to take a train.  A rail network is a reasonable convenience for the rest of us 19th century dandies.

 

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

Clocking in at 999 square kilometers, Luxembourg is smaller than Rhode Island.  And despite going to school close to the center of that state, I used to bicycle to the state border and back for fun.  But it’s still not as small as…

 

Lichtenstein

Which weighs in at 99 square kilometers.  We’re getting into a range where riding the length of the country by bicycle only ads thirty minutes to your trip.  The notoriously neutral country, Switzerland, once mistakenly invaded Lichtenstein with 170 armed troops because it forgot it was there. Their national anthem is sung to the tune of God Save the Queen (not the Sex Pistols version), which is probably confusing when Lichtenstein occasionally wins an Olympic medal in alpine skiing.  It’s won nine. Lichtenstein is a viking in alpine skiing (otherwise known as ‘getting to work’ in Lichtenstein.)  The country takes an official lunch break/quiet time from noon to 1:30 PM.  You couldn’t be more quaint if a University of Nevada student wandered into Burning Man and wondered aloud if they’d be able to score some weed here.

As of yet, no Ticket to Ride: The Vatican City.  I get that.  It would cost a lot to make custom pope-mobile trains.

 

The Emerald City

At first I presumed this was a Ticket to Ride expansion exploring L. Frank Baum’s world of Oz.  Which… sounds like a really good idea considering the vast distances through the strange realms of a fantastic alternate reality American Mid-West during a time when the locomotive was king.  But, no.  The Emerald City in this expansion refers to Seattle, fantastic land of hipsters and rain.

Which is fine.  It’s easy to re-imagine Ticket to Ride as a game about local commute train networks.  It’s not so easy to imagining multiple different companies dropping tracks between stations so that a typical commuter must change trains five times to get to their destination.  But even that doesn’t bother me.  What bothers me, considering all the great transit systems in all the great cities of the world, is that a map for Seattle was created not once, but twice.

I mean, we’re talking about a city that features a one mile monorail with only one stop.  In Ticket to Ride: the Emerald City, the first person to match six cars and play them should be declared the owner of the monorail and winner of the game.

 

Hawaii

Hawaii is a chain composed of hundreds islands, many of which are volcanic.  There are no current freight trains in Hawaii.  Everything is shipped by truck or by boat. There’s no reason to send your product to the middle of the large island, unless you’re planning on tossing it in a volcano.

Hawaii does have passenger service trains, however.  Mostly for funsies, as far as I can tell from the Hawaiian Railway Society.  The HART should also provide public transportation throughout Honolulu county in 2018.  Passenger service on the islands is a combination of practical local alternatives and tourism.  But there’s a little part of me that wants to believe that it can be the next industrial wonder of the world, as outlined by this expansion map:

I love the ambition in this map.  The designer not only chose to connect the islands with tracks that would normally span twenty to thirty miles across (maybe 40 kilometers) hopping from island to island, but decided to run tracks charging across the open sea for 280 kilometers (about 175 miles.)  There’s a plane that flies back and forth between the approximate locations of Kaumalapau and Kekaha three times a day, and it’s a 45 minute flight.  The Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge in China is currently the longest bridge in the world, stretching for 164 kilometers following the marshy region created by the delta of the Yangtze River.  What kind of supertechnology is keeping the Kaumalapau-Kekaha together?  How high must the tracks be elevated to protect it from waves as tall as the Christmas Tree in Rockefeller Center?  Would it make more sense to seal the track off from the environment and create a channel tunnel far below the waves, running along the murky sides of underwater volcanoes?  I don’t know.  What I do know is I want to ride that train.

 

Antarctica

Yes.  That place with all the penguins.  No, not the Polar Express.  Santa lives on the North Pole, and his train is clearly powered by magic.

You know how the trains operate throughout the remote Yukon wilderness throughout the winter?  They don’t.  There’s too much snow and ice, and not enough people to remove it.  But when you absolutely must clear your tracks of snow drifts up to the size of the train itself, you’re going to need mammoth plows that fit on the prow of the train, and snowblower cars with a large chopping fan the size of… well… a woolly mammoth.

My first thought was that you’d need to run these leviathans around the clock to clear the tracks of snow.  But maybe that’s not true.  The majority of Antarctica is one gigantic desert.  Annual precipitation is only 8 inches (200 milometers) along the coast, and much less inland.  Below this snow is 7,000 feet of archaic ice.  That isn’t going anywhere. Clear the snow once in order to build the tracks, and you’re probably good to go.  Snow drifts from 200 mph (327 km/h) winds, however, may prove aggravating.

In fact Antarctica was once home to one narrow gauge railway, commissioned by Jules Dumont d’Urville to bring exploration equipment further into the mainland.  But the designer of this particular module has something far greater in mind than a simple steam powered sled.  They want to carve up the deadliest continent on Earth with landscape ripping devil engines.

A reminder: During the summer, Antarctica features a maximum population of 5,000 people (less than 150 people are hardy/foolish enough to claim permanent residence year round.)  That’s a lot of trains for not a lot of people.  This expansion proposes 48 separate train lines, or approximately one train for every one hundred Summer tourists.  Doesn’t seem terribly practical.  But I’m willing to imagine this map as a vision of what the future might hold in a hundred or so years.  By then, I’m sure every conductor and crew will be an animatronic Tom Hanks.   Otherwise, how would we ever get enough nightmare fuel to power the engines?

 

Wonderland

The world of Lewis Carol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass makes for an excellent idea for a whimsical railway system.  You could pick up a train at… Humpty Dumpty and ride it to the Lobster Quadrille.  You hop on a train at… Bill the Lizard?  You know… the Bill the Lizard stop.  Then ride it out to… Off With His Head?  Odd name for a city, that one.  You could call all your friends at the Caucus Race and invite them to Eat Me.  Okay, let’s take a step back. This isn’t going the way I wanted it to…

Sure, Alice adventures through a wondrous land.  But like a fever dream of faces where the background melts away, Wonderland is about the strange and contrary people that live in that kingdom, and not the land itself.  Alice doesn’t meet Humpty Dumpty in any specific neighborhood.  They’re just “standing under a tree, each with an arm around the other’s neck.”  Still, the designer didn’t seem to put in the effort to make up the difference.  The beach where the Walrus & the Carpenter poem isn’t named?  Oyster Bay will do.  Why are we calling a space ‘Painting Roses’, and not ‘The Royal Garden’?  I’m sorry I’m not all that funny right now, but sometimes I think of words as if they were children or animals, and I hate to see them abused like this.

I must give the designer partial credit for one thing, though.  That’s clearly a picture on the bottom of the map of Channing Tatum as the White Queen.  And anyone who likes how Tatum put every ounce of herself into her performance of the White Queen in an otherwise forgettable Wonderland film can’t be all bad.

Dickensian Intrigue

Another abstract board from the same designer as Wonderland.  At least with this one, the title immediately warned me we wouldn’t be exploring Industrial-Age London (sadly), so I’m not as upset to see routes between ‘Ebeneezer Scrooge’ and ‘Arthur Havisham’.  Though, I’m put off that there’s nothing really ‘intriguing’ going on.  And there’s a space called ‘Boy’.  I’m pretty sure this is supposed to be the boy who tells Scrooge that it is Christmas Day, and yes he’ll fetch a goose for the Crachit family.  Surely, we could have found a more prominent character than that out of Dickens twenty novels and novellas.  If we did, though, we wouldn’t be able to take a train from ‘Boy’ to ‘Fanny Biggetywitch’.

 

Springfield

Home of the Simpsons, with a cast of characters in the thousands and a city which could be located in any state (Psst.  It’s Oregon.)  The world of the Simpsons even includes a defunct monorail system that… this designer seemed to completely forget about and make no reference to.  Ah well.  Now it’s stuck in my head.  Excuse me for a second while I sing the entire song to myself to make it go away.

One of the beauties of using Springfield as your fictional location of choice is that in the city’s now twenty-nine year televised history, it developed into a fully fleshed out metropolis, which doubles as a cross-section of Americana.  If there isn’t a store or industry in Springfield yet, it’s only a matter of time before the writers of The Simpsons arc a sub-plot around it.  Lisa Simpson, once critical of the monorail Lyle Lanley was shilling the town, put the screws to him by saying, “I’d like you to explain why we should build a mass-transit system in a small town with a centralized population.”  According to Lanley, “I could give you an answer, but the only ones who would understand it would be you and me… and that includes your teacher.”  Maybe Lanley, huxster that he was, did know something.  Maybe the only two people in town that could understand that Springfield would someday need a monorail was himself, and a strikingly optimistic girl genius.

 

The Island of Sodor

The Island of Sodor is a fictional island that sits in the Irish Sea between the English mainland, and the Isle of Man.  It’s the setting for The Railway Series of 42 books by Rev. Wilbert Audrey which were pattered off of real life events that happened to trains, and the people who rode them.  Though, most people today are more likely to recognize the Island of Sodor because it’s home to Thomas the Tank Engine.

Mind blown.  This is like finding out Bob the Builder takes place in the world of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.  It’s not that The Railway Series was intended to be serious literature, because these books were clearly intended for young children.  It’s that Audrey took the time to make the Island of Sodor a complex landscape with fully fleshed economic dynamics, social structures, and politics taken from historical railroad companies in England and, again, this is the current setting of Thomas the frickin’ Tank Engine.

Middle Earth

While the fictional setting of the Lord of the Rings doesn’t claim to include as many source books as the Island of Sodor does, some fans are willing to argue that the humble ‘world’ of Middle Earth could be fleshed out into its own little fantasy setting.  Oh, also:

 

Speaking of memes, the designer was thoughtful enough to allow us to take some hobbits to Isengard.  Gard, gard, gard.

I don’t have much more to say about this expansion.  It’s far too beautiful to criticize, and even comes with interesting character cards (Gimli, for example, is superior at tunneling through mountains.)  If you’re curious about downloading and playing one of these custom expansions, I’d start with this one.

 

Space

Nothing specific.  It’s just space.

There’s a good mix here, but all these locations are within our Solar System.  Except for the two black holes.  I’m pretty sure we’d know if they were in our Solar System.  The UFO is more of a subject for debate.  The rest are planets, dwarf planets, moons, satellites and asteroids named ‘asteroid’.  Must be confusing at asteroid conventions.

Of note:  According to this game, you can take an express train from the International Space Station orbiting Earth, and ride it to 50000 Quaoar, a Kuiper Belt dwarf planet 14 AUs or more beyond Pluto.  Which would probably seem ambitious if I knew what a space train was.

For those small minded individuals who are only interested in building transit systems on one celestial body at a time, there are also maps for the Moon (both light side, and dark side) as well as Mars.

 

That ain’t all folks…

When writing this article, I was gifted with a plethora of choices.  There are too many for me to talk about in depth, so I’m talking about the rest of these oddballs in shallowth:

• Animals to Ride – In which you hop a train from rabbit to frog.  It’s less strange when you realize that the designer intended for children to play this set.
• Westeros – As big a nerd as I am, I still haven’t read or watched A Game of Thrones, so I don’t know much beyond the fact that there’s a delicious red velvet wedding cake featured at some point.  So I can’t really chat up the setting.  Shame! Shame! Shame!
• Upside-down Map – For… playing the game upside-down.  Yes, I suppose you could turn the board around and get the same effect.  This map, however, features the name of cities upside-down so you can be vaguely annoyed no matter where you sit around the table.
• Roman Italy and Ancient Greece – For people who know that the Industrial Revolution and the Iron Age were time periods in history, but aren’t particularly keen on the order.
• Winnie-the-Pooh – For those who aren’t afraid to barrel a diesel engine through the heart of the Hundred Acre woods.  The Pooh Bear Express smashes Eeyore’s home into kindling once per hour, on the hour.
• Alvin & Dexter – Alvin’s an alien UFO, and Dexter is a Tyrannosaurus rex.  They rampage across the map, delaying passage and destroying tracks in their path.  Stranger still, this wasn’t an oddball homebrew idea.  It’s an official expansion.
• Hallowe’en – The map for this expansion is a skeleton.  No, not a skeleton of a map.  It’s a picture of a skeleton, bones and all, with destinations between each joint.  Tibia honest, I don’t know why I didn’t bone up this entire article with humerus skele-puns.  I guess I didn’t have the guts.