This is not a review of Ticket to Ride, which is – needless to say – a wonderful game, both for experienced gamers and for those weened on Monopoly and Life. If you’ve never played it, stop reading right now and go here to play for free. (Their publisher, Days of Wonder, has an interesting business model as well – their online games are free-to-play but pay-to-host.)

No, what I would like to talk about is the story of Ticket to Ride. Since you have played the game (seriously, just go do it), reflect for a moment on what the game is about. During the game, you lay tracks to connect distant cities while trying to block your opponents from finishing their own routes. There are sub goals too, like having the longest contiguous rail line and completing your network first, which ends the game for everyone. It’s essentially a simplified version of Railroad Tycoon, right? Right?

Let me quote from first page of the game rules:

On a blustery autumn evening five old friends met in the backroom of one of the city’s oldest and most private clubs. Each had traveled a long distance – from all corners of the world – to meet on this very specific day… October 2, 1900 – 28 years to the day that the London eccentric, Phileas Fogg, accepted and then won a £20,000 bet that he could travel Around the World in 80 Days.

Each succeeding year, they met to celebrate the anniversary and pay tribute to Fogg. And each year a new expedition (always more difficult) was proposed. Now at the dawn of the century it was time for a new impossible journey. The stakes: $1 Million in a winner-takes-all competition. The objective: to see which of them could travel by rail to the most cities in North America – in just 7 days.

Ticket to Ride is a cross-country train adventure. Players compete to connect different cities by laying claim to railway routes on a map of North America.

What?!? This storyline makes the game sound almost like a spiritual successor to Around the World in 80 Days instead of what it actually is – another link in the great chain of railroad tycoon games. The fiction simply does not match the gameplay. For example, why does a player “claim” a route just by riding on it? Do the trains shut down, preventing anyone else from using that line? On the other hand, “claiming” routes matches perfectly with the fiction of ruthless rail barons trying to monopolize the best connections.

This disconnect leads to some interesting questions. Does a game’s designer have the right to tell us what the “story” is if it doesn’t match what’s going on inside our own heads while we are playing the game? And if the designer doesn’t have this right, then does a game’s official “story” ever matter at all because it can be invalidated so easily? However, setting the game in the world of trains was clearly very important – if Ticket to Ride was a game about bus lines, I doubt it would have nearly the same resonance. Once again, setting trumps story in importance…

Part of a recent interview I did with Kieron Gillen just went up on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I’ll post links when the rest of the interview emerges. Here are some quotes:

RPS: Ballooning team size is a trend which has been well discussed over the last decade, but do you think that’s reversing slightly on the PC now? As long as you set your sights intelligently…

Soren: I’m in an odd position, going from Civ 4 which was a big project, to Spore which is a mammoth project… but it’s just that I think most of the stuff which is going to benefit from smaller teams is going to be stuff comes across the web. We see that all the time now. It’s finally a viable market. Think of Defcon. That game didn’t have art. Which is brilliant.

RPS: Very artfully chosen unart, if you know what I mean.

Soren: It’s a weird feeling – I play the game, and it looks great, because they chose a brilliant style. It doesn’t need art. It just fits their game perfectly. But the interesting thing to me about Defcon is that the size of the game is right. It’s a pretty good game – it’s not quite a brilliant game, but it’s a fun game to play. But you can’t say that it’s too simple or too complex. It reminded me of a lot of RTS’s when I first discovered them a decade ago. Now it’s really difficult with an RTS to…

RPS: Not submit to the endless feature bloat. You have to have all the bullet-points.

Soren: Yeah, you can’t make it without a campaign and scenarios and an editor and cutscenes and all that extra junk. Really, that junk is preventing us from making more interesting games. It’s kind of a paradox. Obviously, people want that junk, and it’s a good thing for those people. And the editors with which people make their own scenarios is great… but that stuff all comes at a cost. I think maybe we’re starting to realise that now. The answer is that the economics get turned entirely around when you don’t have to deal with Best Buy and Wal-Mart and what not.

RPS: People endlessly talk about the declining PC, but the figures never include those specific areas where the PC is expanding – the online sales, MMOs. When we started RPS, for me it was about trying to redefine what a PC Game is to include all that. I’m sure Peggle will be in everyone’s top 10 games this year… but can you imagine a game like Peggle being included in mainstream PC talk a few years ago?

Soren: Or Desktop: Tower Defense. That’s an awesome game too. I play that more than most strategy games I’ve played this year. Which is weird but… what does that mean? So yeah, absolutely. The PC Market is no one thing any more. There’s no sales figures you can look at. The question is simply is “What is the variety coming through? What are the different options available we didn’t have three or four years ago”. For me, PC Gaming should be like Punk Rock – being able to do whatever you want. And people are forgetting that the Punk period isn’t just the Ramones and the Sex Pistols… it’s Talking Heads, Televisions, Patti Smith, Pere Ubu, Gang of Four… this huge variety of stuff because people were making it up as they were going along. It was easy enough to make music that people did what they wanted to. And that’ll always be the advantage of PCs.

RPS: I interviewed Doug Church about what it was like developing when the PC had started being a real gaming platform, circa 92 or whatever. And, basically, when doing Shock they just didn’t know what they were doing. They were original by default. In the following 15 years, like the feature bloat, by learning what works, it also limits you a bit. The people in the mainstream need to work out what ELSE works. But the European teams try stuff which no-one else does, because they don’t know any better. Like the Bohemia Armed-Assault guys, trying forever working on their butterflies…

Soren: That’s games. And it’s funny how much pleasure people can get from little things in games which you’ve never seen before. I know what you mean – think about RTS. What does that term mean? Now it means a very specific thing… but what else is Real time strategy? The first Sim City was real time strategy. Populous was an RTS. Rollercoaster Tycoon is RTS. You could say M.U.L.E. was RTS. Obviously Defcon and Darwinia are. RTS should be the biggest category there is, but right now it’s very, very specific. There are a few triple A titles which are trying to push it – World in Conflict was an interesting take on that. But you need people to come along who aren’t intimidated by all the stuff that exists already in the genre.

Here’s another crazy Asian cube game that you must play. Be sure not to give up as the designers don’t prepare you for the fact that you are using your current “lives” to help your later “lives” succeed.