Ticket To Ride: Legends of the West is a legacy board game served family-style
Pandemic Legacy turned a lot of heads when it came out in 2015, not the least of which was the head of Alan R. Moon. His award-winning game Ticket To Ride,launched in 2004, quickly became one of the hobby’s vanguard titles, widely touted as a gateway into the marvelous (if ever so slightly intimidating) world of modern board gaming. Why not build a legacy version of Ticket To Ride? Pretty soon, his phone started to ring.
“I actually had some other offers from people over the years,” Moon told Polygon in a recent interview. “‘We should do a Ticket To Ride legacy game!’ Well, you know, maybe. But I’m not sure you would be who I would choose. Why wouldn’t I go with the two main guys? [...] That was really the first step for me.”
The “two main guys,” of course, are themselves award-winning game designers — Rob Daviau, the creator of the legacy genre of board games, and Matt Leacock, the creator of Pandemic. Finally, in 2016, Moon got everyone on the same email thread. Together, the trio of Spiel des Jahres winners created Ticket To Ride: Legends of the West.
“Matt and I just spoke once,” Daviau recalled, trying to piece together the making of a game that stretches well before the COVID-19 lockdowns. “I’m like, ‘We’re doing this, right?’ And he’s like, ‘How are we not doing this? There’s no reason to not do this.’ It was an immediate ‘Yes.’”
The reason that Ticket To Ride has earned such a global following — with dozens of variants, expansions, and even collectible editions of the now two-decade-old game — is because of its simplicity. Players draw cards from a shared pool, then use the cards they’ve collected to play suits of matching cards to the table. Once played, those cards are transformed permanently into train lines
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