Ticket to Ride: First Journey - A Family Review

Next stop, world adventure! Ticket to Ride is reimagined as a simple-to-play, European-set game for kids six and up, and we had a blast playing it. It has simplified rules from the original version but didn’t cut any of the charm.

7yo: “I loved it! I liked that I could play with the whole family.”

If you’ve got younger kids who want to game, Ticket to Ride: First Journey has several adaptations to make it more friendly for those players. Our younger kids loved the bigger train pieces—they were super detailed and easier to manipulate for little hands—and the art was cute and engaging.

As parents, we loved that each location on the map had both the city name and a cartoon graphic unique to that city. This made it easier for early readers or non-readers to understand different locations, while our older kids still learned new city names! One challenge? The board is visually busy. Between all the fun cartoons and colourful train tracks, it’s a bit difficult to pick out the train routes.

9yo: “It was a bit easy—I wanted a bigger challenge. It is a good game to play with my younger siblings!”

The strategy and turns are simple and fairly straightforward. Though our seven-year-old needed parental support with her turns at first, she gained confidence as the game progressed. She could definitely play independently in her second game, and it sounds like the older kids want to give that a go. They called it the sort of game that they’d pull out for a family game night with younger siblings, but they also explained that for a game with just them or their friends, they’d rather unbox the original version of Ticket to Ride.

Including the younger kids on game night can be a challenge, but something like Ticket to Ride: First Journey is a fun, approachable, and time-smart way to get everybody playing together.

Helpful hints

• Similar to other Ticket to Ride games, each different colour is also associated with a unique symbol, making gameplay more accessible for colour blind players.
• The game is short and the turns go by quickly, so nobody is left waiting or bored for very long.