Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West
My gaming highlight for our winter in Napa was playing the Ticket to Ride legacy game.
Playing our final session of spring 2025
Over 13 years ago, Jacob, Matthew, and I were deep into the first legacy game ever made: Risk Legacy. A legacy game is a campaign game:
- You play through a narrative story arc over many sessions
- The game state changes permanently through the campaign. New rules get created. The map board changes. Cards get torn up and thrown away.
Ticket to Ride Legacy was a gift from Jacob to Kaitlin and we were lucky to have them living with us and get through six sessions over the two months (or so) that we were co-located.
Early sessions were fast: the map board was small, the player train count was small. The play times for the first three games: 36, 38, and 44 minutes. This fit perfectly with managing Rory’s bath and bed time. We could fit in a game starting at 7:30pm and still make our normal bed time.
Recent plays are pushing past an hour towards 90 minutes, but that’s by design.
I can’t share specifics beyond that the game models the westward (and southward) expansion of the train system in the USA. There are plenty of mini / temporary goals to shoot for that drive strategy for a given game. It embraces the heart of TtR and builds on it with plenty of tactile fun. We won’t resume and finish until next fall.