Jessi: Ticket to Ride is the perfect game. It's quick to learn and quick to teach new players, yet there are some great strategeries involved. That's probably the reason we play all the time.

Joe: That, and it only takes 15 minutes to play.

Jessi: Are we talking about the card game or the board game?

Joe: Oh. Both? The card game can be played in 15 minutes with our modified rules, and the board game only takes about an hour.

Jessi: I guess the card game usually takes half an hour, but when we play with half the deck, it goes pretty quickly and works pretty well.

Nikki: Yeah, the game is the perfect length. Not too long and not too short. But, let's talk about the board game.

Joe: About the board game...

Nikki: The object of the game is to create railroad routes throughout the U.S. going through major cities. At the beginning of the game you receive route cards with cities you must connect in order to gain “pwahnts” (AKA points). You connect the cities by collecting different color train cards and on subsequent turns playing sets of similar colored cards in the number stated on the board.

Joe: One of the things that makes this game good is that you really only have to do one of three things on any given turn. Draw train cards, place trains on the map, or draw more destination cards. While an experienced player can usually wipe the floor with a new player, the limited number options keeps the novice from ever being overwhelmed.

Jessi: You'll get points for completing your destination cards, and you'll get points for putting trains on the map (and the longer trains get a lot more points: a two-train track gets two points, and a track with six trains gets 15 points). It's also fun to keep other people from getting their points. Once, three of us kept Joe from getting to Seattle because we could tell that's where he was going. Or if you remember that someone keeps picking up blue cards, you can try picking up the blue cards before they do. Ooo, and another way to make people mad; once Polly was lining up all her trains in a rectangle, so we pushed the game board into them to mess them up. Hmmm, maybe you had to be there. It was hilarious at the time, but now it just sounds mean, huh?!

Nikki: A couple different kinds of strategerie is trying to make all your routes into one continuously long train because it gives you extra pwahnts. Another one is when people don't focus on routes or destinations they just do all the six train tracks because they give you a lot of pwahnts. It's also cool to pick a favorite city and then get pissed if someone tries to go there. May favorites are Hotlanta and Santa Fe.

Jessi: Mine is Sault St Marie because it's fun to say.

Joe: Mine is Portland because I love it. I would marry Portland if I could.

Nikki: There are also spin-offs to this series with different maps including Europe and the Nordic Countries.

Joe: It's like the Propagandhi lyric says: "Kill em all and let a Norse god sort em out"

Nikki: It's actually nothing like that. We f-ing love the Norse.