My Favorite Secret Mechanics From Ticket to Ride Legends of the West

MAJOR SPOILERS!!!!!!

I recently finished a campaign of Ticket to Ride Legends of the West and if you would like to hear my thoughts on the game and a recap of my experience click here below:

This assumes you have an understanding of the game and have either played it your self of want more information after watching my video. I am creating this post because I didn’t wan’t to spoil too much especially the best parts which are the unlockable mechanics. These mechanics are revealed through regions being revealed and through the storyline. There are many I could talk about but the following are my top 5 favorite mechanics in Ticket to Ride Legends of the West.

Ghost Train

On the surface this was the reveal that got me the most excited and is really sitting in this spot because it didn’t end up being incredibly impactful. Once revealed the ghost train is set up in a haunted themed region and each time somebody claims a white route a die is rolled. The number of bones shown is the number of moves the train makes in its special ghost track in the region.

If the train lands next to one of your routes it’s cursed you and you have to draw a curse card which is active until you discard 3 train cards.

I like the idea but unfortunately often when it moved it landed next to empty routes. this is a mechanic that can persist into the end game version which I am excited about.

Company Shares

I really like the prospects of this mechanic once reveled as is added some strategic decisions when choosing routes. There is deck of cards representing the different companies and two are visible at any given time. When you lay a route matching the color you simply take the card. I really enjoyed using this as a guide to figure out which rail I should lay first. Trying to optimize my decisions to get the most of these cards was pretty fun.

The problem with this mechanic especially in a 2 player game was that points were rewarded based upon places and the second place player only needs one card. I killed in in most color categories and only beat my wife by a few points. I think this is a better mechanic at higher player counts.

Connecting Claims & Prospectors

This was a late game mechanic that give you a card and assigns a city as a claim. This city once connected to other cities listed on the card (I think these cities are supposed to have prospectors in them) then allowed you to scratch off a gold nugget to see what reward you got.

Spoiler the rewards were great! I love the mechanics that completely altered strategy and this definitely did. It was an added consideration when choosing tickets and simply what to focus on. Unfortunately, this only lasted one game and I wish it was over multiple games.

Timetable

The timetable was wonderful! This was city bingo. Pretty simpley when you connect in a city cross it off and when you completed rows or columns score 10 points.

This was simple but incredibly effective in distracting you and also creating really tough decisions at the end of the game. This was exactly what I was focusing on in the last few turns of the campaign. You will have to watch my video to see if it worked :)

Circus

This by far was the favorite mechanic for both my wife and I. This started once Florida was revealed and had some color text around a traveling circus that wasn’t particularly memorable. However the mechanic was similar to the company shares where it had you taking actions based on what is visible.

Once revealed there is a box that houses train stickers. Your goal is to complete in your personal circus book rows of these stickers in unique colors. Unlike the company shares mechanic the impact on the game was huge. You can see in the picture above one row alone was 64 points! You can see with my card I bungled it a bit and got caught off guard when the mechanic ended abruptly as we ran out of the allotted stickers for our player count.

The way you acquire the stickers is by laying at least 3 trains. The more you lay the more train stickers you can collect. Each time a player took a sticker they would reveal the next one. This certainly added some tension when you really needed a particular color. Not shown in the picture is another side of the card that has you collect the stickers in a different way which I will let you explore on your own.

That is it, my top 5 secret unlockable mechanics. This by no means is everything and off the top of my head I can count another 5 that you will have fun exploring.