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Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam is one of the Ticket To Ride small-box city releases that are set in a specific city in a particular time period. TTR: Amsterdam is set in 17th century Amsterdam and I picked this up to celebrate my son, Tad, traveling to modern-day Amsterdam with a mixture of Political Science and Philosophy students from his college. Yes, it is a weird way to celebrate but it was much more economical than trying to tag along and didn't require a passport.
Alan R. Moon and Days of Wonder seem to have settled upon a formula for Ticket To Ride. They Pop out a new city or new map, add one rule to the game and send it out into the wild. The new rule for Amsterdam is Cart Trails. Specific routes on the map are marked with Cart symbols. When you claim one of these routes, you secure a Market Card. At the end of the game, bonus points are awarded to players based on who has more market cards.
The rest of the rules are virtually the same, just toned down for a smaller game/map. Bear with me while I go over a few rules because they become important in this iteration. You are given two route cards at the beginning of the game and you can keep one or both of them (remembering that any uncompleted routes will be negative points). On your turn, you can draw two colored cards from the transportation deck tableau (or a single wild card), claim a route with cards you already have in your hand, or draw two new route cards (keeping at least one).
Taking a wild card from the tableau is now a much more valid move on your turn. This is because the longest routes you will find on the board are a mere four spaces with the majority of paths between locations being one or two spaces. So, that single wild card will usually be what you need to complete a route once you combine it with something in your hand, instead of being something you are drawing to add to 3 or 4 other cards in your hand to work toward a bigger route. And the game still has the standard six different colors of cards, so taking one wild card versus the odds of drawing two cards and getting the color you need isn't the compromise it normally feels like in “typical” Ticket to Ride.
I honestly think that Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam is broken, especially at two players (And adding more players make the competition for spaces a bit tighter but still has all the flaws of the two-player game). Did the two route cards you drew at the beginning of the game happen to be aligned with the cart trails? Congratulations, you've likely won. You can just end the game right there and save yourself the other seven minutes of playing. This is because having the most market cards, in a two-player game, scores eight points for the person with the most market cards and four points to the person with the second most. If completing your routes lets you take a cart path, you are getting double duty from that route and, virtually, double points.De kar is kapot.
If you don't happen to pull routes that can use the cart trials, you still have to finish at least one of them in order to not get negative points for NOT completing them. So, you are can be stuck with grabbing trails without the coveted Cart symbols just to complete it and get it out of your hand. And this leads to the final conundrum of Amsterdam: What is the point of wasting a turn pulling new route cards that can be potentially negative points and, even if you complete it, the reward is only going to be, on average, about three or four points. And if you do manage to pull a higher point route are you going to have enough carts to actually finish that route, because each player only has 16 total trains...err...carts to place during the entire game? And don't forget that any player placing fourteen of their carts triggers the end game. This means the more logical move is just grab one of the Cart Routes for the bonus Market Card or buy one of the 4 space grey routes (which scores seven points on it own), even if they don't connect to any place you are going...or even connect to any previous routes you have claimed.
I know I've been playing Ticket to Ride for decades, so that alone speeds up how long turns, and thus the game, takes but I've literally finished entire games of Amsterdam in less than eight minutes. That is not even long enough to constitute a “Filler” game and makes play-on-the-toilet mobile games feel like Twilight Imperium by comparison. This is one of the most disappointing Ticket To Ride releases that I have ever played, which is a pity because if you house rule it that everyone must read their completed routes out loud when they claim them. Well, That is quality entertainment.
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