I am part of the Asmodee UK Blogger Board Game Club run by Playtime PR. Each month 50 bloggers are sent a board game to play and put to the test. This month we were sent Ticket to Ride First Journey to play.

Ticket to Ride First Journey is a board game designed for 2-4 players aged 6+. I played it with my 7 year old son. My son loves maps and geography, so we were really excited when we were setting the game up. The rules take a couple of reads throughs to understand, but it’s actually quite simple to play.

The game consists of a board with a map of Europe on it with key train stations such as Amsterdam, Berlin and Athens. The box contains a set of 72 train cards, 32 ticket cards, 4 coast-to-coast cards and 1 golden ticket. There are also four different sets of coloured trains.

Each player chooses a colour of train to be; I was red, he was green. The aim of the game is to be the first player to complete 6 tickets, or the first person to place all twenty of their trains on the train tracks.

Each player starts with four coloured train cards and two tickets. Each ticket shows two cities, and you need to connect those two cities with your trains in order to complete the ticket. Taking turns, you have a ticket, say from London to Athens and using the coloured train cards you have to plot a route between them using your trains across the coloured paths.

If you complete a track which crosses the board entirely from east to west, or west to east, then you pick up the East-to-West bonus card, which counts as one completed ticket.

Ticket to Ride seems quite complicated, but it’s really not. Once we had played it once, my 7 year old had really got the hang of it. We’ve played it over and over, which is always a sign he likes playing something. It’s good fun for adults too, I quite enjoyed trying to plot my route from A to B.  It can be quite a quick game to play if you don’t have very long, and it’s great for short attention spans.

Ticket to Ride First Journey is fairly widely available and costs around £28. It’s a well made, quality board game. The board is longer than your standard Monopoly style board. The size of the board is why completing the East-to West route is so coveted. I would say that you get 20 trains of each colour and we have never completed six tickets; we have always run out of trains after two or three tickets worth of travel.

Overall, we really liked Ticket to Ride First Journey. It’s a really appealing game, especially for train and map enthusiasts. My son really enjoyed playing it, and I really liked that it’s got a nice geography element to it, so you can really start to learn where the major cities of Europe are. It’s a thumbs up from us!