Ticket to Ride takes a bland, tedious sounding subject—building a railroad system—and makes it fun and entertaining. As a board game, it's considered a modern classic. Now on Android (and iOS), players from around the world can match their rail-baron skills whenever they like, if they can get past the app's irritating interface.

All Aboard!
In Ticket to Ride you build your rail empire by claiming routes between cities. You score points for each route—the longer the better—and claim them by collecting the appropriate number of colored cards from the sideboard. You score extra points for completing Tickets, lengthy, multi-city routes, and for having the longest continuous route on the board.

As a board game, Ticket to Ride can be an imposing, with tons of little pieces and cards in addition to a lengthy scoring process. The mobile version of the game does away with all the fiddly, tedious parts of the board game and lets you focus on strategy and play.

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In this respect, Ticket to Ride shines. The games are fun, surprisingly brief, and frequently challenging. The tension for each round comes from having so many options—from claiming train lines, drawing cards, or drawing tickets—and only being able to choose one action. Once you start playing you can see why this is considered a classic board game.

Ticket to Ride ships with just the classic board, but expansions are available for purchase at several locations in the app.

A lengthy tutorial, comprising an entire game, uses pop-up windows to tell you what to do. I was surprised that although I couldn't turn off the tutorial and finish the game on my own, I could ignore its advice and the tutorial seemed to adapt in turn. Towards the end of the game, with my defeat all but assured, the tutorial started giving me bizarre, bad advice. It also didn't inform me of some game mechanics, like under what circumstances the pool of available cards resets.

Even without the tutorial running, the game isn't always clear about what is happening or what should happen next. Prompts to draw cards are small, displayed at the bottom of the screen, and fade quickly. It's hard to get back into the game up after you've set it aside, since you'll probably forget what you were doing.

Weirdly, the multiplayer controls appear to be split between the lobby (located in the "restaurant" section) and the screen where you begin a game. The iOS version is much simpler and also includes pass-and-play games and LAN games. The multiplayer menus of the Android version were so confusing, I wasn't sure if these features were present.