Ticket to Ride: Heart of Africa was the first expansion to really change the basic game significantly. It did so in two very distinct but related ways. It added a third deck of terrain cards, giving players a choice of drawing train cards or terrain cards each turn.

But the bigger change was to the board. In all other versions of the game, I had tried not to have any city connect by more than one route of any color (except grey). But in this game, I wanted the cities to have as many routes of the same color into them as possible. This changes the way players must draw cards, and adds quite a bit of value to the wild cards, with the gold at the end of the rainbow being the extra points players score for the terrain cards.