Hi Alice,

Thanks for raising some very interesting questions and points! I’ll try to answer as many as I can…

So, France and the Old West comes with components for an ADDITIONAL player, but not enough components for all players, and that’s why you need the base game. Without the base game, you wouldn’t have the full deck of train cards, nor the trains for the usual number of players. It’s true that the more expansions you buy, the more “extra” trains and things you will have, many of which you’ll never use.

I don’t personally have any experience playing with several maps side by side. If you were to go that route, I’d suggest that you’d need to do some balancing and playtesting.

If you’re considering how best to invest your money in the Ticket to Ride games, I would likely start with the base game alone, then begin picking up expansions if there are ones you especially fancy.

If you’re completely new to TTR, then you might also want to look at the standalone games called Ticket to Ride: London or Ticket to Ride: New York. These are smaller, entirely separate games that are cheaper and have a specific focus on one city. Personally, I prefer the faster gameplay.

Hope that helps.

Regards
Matt

See, I don’t see why we would need the base game to play the expansions seeing as the expansions themselves seem to come with whatever’s needed to play that exp/game.

So my question is how is the base game needed in the expansions seeing as they are played separately anyway and not like added to make a humongous map? Can they be played simultaneously e.g. France exp + base Europe? If so,how – map boards side by side ? Mixing all the tickets and transport cards? If not, I might as well just save me some money and buy the expansion without getting the base game.

Hoping to get this cleared up,
Alice