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Most Valuable Cities in “Ticket to Ride”

Most Valuable Cities in “Ticket To Ride”

I was having a late game night with my friends, and Ticket to Ride was spread out across the dance studio floor (we had snuck in after hours to do what naughty college kids do: play games). It was the latter end of the game and everyone was trying to finish their final railroad connections to swoop up some extra points. But one of my friends, realizing he couldn’t finish his own rail, made a bold move — he used his turn instead to build on a railway someone else needed, thereby blocking them off from their crucial city. This got me thinking about how Ticket to Ride, unlike most games, is incredibly reliant on the board structure. It is a game all about nodes and connections. Each of the Ticket to Ride versions (a European board, a Eurasian board) must change the underlying structure of the game completely. It would change where you would want to build and how you want to build it.

With that same thought in mind, the makers of this blog decided to construct an analysis of which cities on the American map were the most valuable to connect to, based on their position and the other cities they connected with. Normally, the strategy of the game is connecting the cities you have the cards for, but this analysis takes a different approach: going for the important cities first to make sure you control that connection. Like my friend’s play at our game night, it also blocks other players from that connection.

In their analysis, they measured how many cards required connections to a given city and divided that by the number of connections coming from that city. This doesn’t completely accurately model the importance of a city in my opinion — it doesn’t take into consideration the nodes connected to connected nodes, for instance, which would be needed in order to fully understand the importance of cities. But their analysis is a start, and it found Miami and Los Angeles to be the most “valuable” cities. Those two cities are clearly very important, so there could be something behind this approach. Perhaps a more detailed network analysis of Ticket to Ride (that looked at the web of connections) could create a strong strategy for this board game.

Reading this also made me consider whether the makers of Ticket to Ride did this kind of analysis. I have a hunch they didn’t — that most of the balancing of the game came through playtesting. If that is indeed the case, perhaps a board/game could be created using network analysis that makes the game more difficult or harder for one player to find and exploit an advantage. Perhaps the “perfect” Ticket to Ride board is still waiting to be made.

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