They get them on their iPhones and want to play them for real. People are finding out about games they might otherwise never have heard of.
The internet hasn’t hurt board gaming at all. “Originally I thought: ‘Why would you want to let people play the thing for free? They’ll never buy the board game”, said Moon. They spiked again when the company released versions of the game for the iPhone and iPad – reaching a level of popularity which has surprised even its creator. Today there are players who have completed over 100,000 games.Īnd, said Hautemont, sales of the physical game increased by around 30% after the launch of the online version. The company found users were spending long periods playing online – some clocked up over 40 hours a week. People buy games like Monopoly because they’re already familiar with them, and this was a way to make people familiar with Ticket to Ride.” Playing 40 hours per week
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“If you stand on the street and hand out free copies of a game to people, you could check back a year later and nine out of 10 of them won’t have taken it out of the box. “The rationale was that we wanted to get as many people playing as possible”, said Hautemont.
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But interest in the game surged when its publishers decided to make it available for free online. Ticket to Ride sold well, and in 2004 it received the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award, considered the highest accolade in the industry. Suddenly he swept all the pieces off the board and said: ‘Well, now you get the idea.’ We just gasped and said ‘Hey, what are you doing? We were playing!’ A few weeks later we called Alan and told him we wanted to publish the game.” “I remember when Alan first showed us the game,” said Eric Hautemont, co-founder of game publisher Days of Wonder. This first two didn’t reply, but the third offered him a meeting. Moon sent his design to three publishers. I couldn’t wait to get home and get a prototype together.” “Suddenly the idea for Ticket to Ride just came into my head pretty much fully formed. I’d just tested a design for a train game with friends and it hadn’t worked at all – it was too complicated. “The idea for it came to me when I was out for a walk one day. The success of Ticket to Ride saved him from having to get a “normal job”, he says. By the time he graduated from university there was one thing he wanted to do above all else: design a best-selling board game.īut while his designs were well-received by niche “hobbyist” gamers, none sold well enough to provide him with a steady income. But unlike many of his peers, he never stopped playing. “I was working as a waiter to give myself some flexibility, but in truth I was working too many hours and I had less and less time to devote to design.”Ī lifelong gamer, some of Moon’s most enduring childhood memories are of family Risk and Monopoly sessions.
“I wasn’t making much money at it, that’s for sure”, Moon said. The financial hardship was taking its toll. He had spent two decades in a succession of low-paid jobs, working on game designs in his spare time. In 2003 its designer, Alan R Moon was on the verge of giving up. In an industry where a game with sales in the five figures can be considered a hit, Ticket to Ride has sold over three million copies and generated retail sales of more than $150m (£93.3m).įor all its success, though, the game came close to never being published. It’s a thoughtful and understated example of game design – and in the 10 years since Ticket to Ride was first published it’s proven extremely popular. Should you claim routes that work to your advantage, or ones which block off options for your opponents? Should you take the most direct route between your objective cities, or a more roundabout path to avoid giving away your plans? Sales of $150m It asks players to make constant tactical decisions. This makes Ticket to Ride a game of strategy, subtlety and opportunism. Fail, and you’ll take a penalty that could drop you from first to last place. Link those cities up by the end of the game and you’ll receive bonus points. Each player also receives cards listing pairs of cities. Most turns see players taking one of two actions – adding cards to their hand or playing cards to claim routes between cities on the board. Played on a lavishly illustrated map of the United States and Canada, the game is deceptively simple. Released in 2004, it casts players as travellers crossing North America in the age of steam. One of the most successful productions of this board game renaissance is Ticket to Ride.
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