Ticket to Ride Legacy tosses American history in the trash, and it’s better for it

polygon.com:

Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West brings together a powerful trio of award-winning designers — the original creator of Ticket to Ride, Alan R. Moon; the creator of Pandemic, Matt Leacock; and the inventor of the legacy genre of board games, Rob Daviau. Together, after five long years of development, these men have achieved something remarkable. Ticket to Ride Legacy is nothing less than the reinvention of the classic board game first released in 2004, and likely the start of a whole new franchise for its owner, board game giant Asmodee.

Moreover, it was accomplished without the slavish attention to historical detail so common in modern economics-themed board games — a niche format with a penchant for fetishizing raw capitalism above all else. In its place are the beginnings of a joyful and fantastical new world, one that I can’t wait to explore further with my friends and family.

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To perform this feat, Legends of the West employs a bit of a bait and switch. It begins with just a partial map of the United States of America circa 1865 — conveniently the same year that the American Civil War ended. Judging by the lay of the land, in any other game it would be time to begin the business of Reconstruction, where a generation of wealthy men with cash on hand snatched up lucrative train lines in an