Five years ago, my family left all our possessions in a shed at the other end of the world and arrived at an inner-city apartment with nothing but some clothes. Needless to say, for quite a while family friendly entertainment was hard to come by. One of the saving graces was the gift of a board game: Ticket to Ride. The game has become a family staple—it's challenging but not unwinnable for the older children, and entertaining for the adults.

Now, the Days of Wonder team have put together a $6.99 iPad version of the game. When the Ars editors were looking for a reviewer with Ben out of town, I had the happy combination of an iPad and familiarity with the board game. The physical game means a lot to me, so I viewed a software version with some trepidation.

Playing the game

For those of you not familiar with the game, here's a quick recap. Ticket to Ride is a railway track-building game, where you collect cards that allow you to lay track between cities on a map—there are regionalized versions, but I have only played the North American version. For each card that you play, you get differing points depending on the length of the track. The twist that makes it work is the route cards: each player has certain pairs of cities that they must connect. Do so and you obtain extra points, failure results in those points being subtracted from your final score.

With a limited amount of track available and various restrictions to the number of tracks that can be laid between adjacent cities, the game quickly becomes an ever-changing mathematical puzzle that will challenge everyone.

The iPad version of Ticket to Ride impresses right from the beginning. The play is directly translated from the board game. The cards and board have the same color and design, and the touchscreen is used to great effect: you pick up cards from the deck and place cards on track locations to lay track. When you complete a route, the game goes through a celebratory routine that leaves you in no doubt as to the brilliance of your accomplishment. The only downside is that the AI players go so fast that you can't keep track of what cards have been selected from the open choices. It is also hard to keep track of how many trains you and everyone else have left, since it is one of four numbers associated with each player.

The AI isn't great. The computer just seems to select one route after another and complete them. Young children do the same, but I would have expected the developers to have programmed some more nuanced strategies. Indeed, the in-game tutorial does an excellent job of teaching the mechanics of the game, but leaves the impression that completing routes sequentially is the best strategy to employ.

Network play

Clearly, Days of Wonder wants you on the 'Net, playing against other players. So I decided to make my online gaming debut and chose network play. After choosing the number of players you want to play against, you wait for a while and then some random Internet dudes gets matched up with you. The gameplay is the same, but the cards move a bit slower, so you can track what the other players are doing a bit better. The in-game chat turned out to be a tiny little speech bubble attached to your player's avatar, but, even with that, the whole experience was a bit... cold. A bit of a downer: when I play games, I want to play with friends. I should note that there is a train station restaurant where you can meet players and arrange games with people you know.

Luckily, Chris Foresman volunteered to be my friend for a day, and off we went. We discovered that the game is a little flaky in network play. The game crashed once and the server booted us a few times. It seems that the timeout period is quite short, so if you get interrupted, expect a bot to take your seat at the table.

Finally, the in-game chat is rudimentary at best. Chat messages show up in speech bubbles that stay on screen for about a nanosecond. If you notice the message, you won't necessarily be able to read it because they make up the lack of longevity by cutting off long messages. I have to say that went a long way to making a great game suck.

Get to the point: is it good or bad?

I love Ticket to Ride and I love the way the iPad version is laid out. Days of Wonder has come up with a fabulous ragtime theme from the end of the steam era. As a standalone game this is a good time, but it's not replacement for the board game, with its more social experience.

Verdict: Buy