Because part of the fun of a legacy game is the surprise twists revealed throughout the campaign, I'm going to try to be a bit circumspect in my thoughts here. Still, if you plan to play yourself and don't want anything spoiled for you in any way, perhaps you should just skip to the last paragraph here for my summation.
Ticket to Ride Legacy comes from legacy game gurus Rob Daviau and Matt Leacock (along with original Ticket to Ride designer Alan R. Moon), and I'm pleased to say that despite the large number of legacy games they've created, they haven't run out of innovation or new ideas. One aspect of this game in particular feels like an evolution on the genre that I expect to see popping up in future legacy games. (Small spoiler here: most mechanics or "modules" in the game have a built-in expiration to ensure they'll last only a few games before passing out of the campaign. This is a mechanism to control the ever-escalating complexity that's a not-always-good hallmark of previous legacy games.)
The game also delighted me with one of the components revealed early in the campaign. I'm not usually the sort of gamer who is swept up by a particular part in a board game; I'm much more drawn to the way the systems of the game interact with one another. But when this particular component was revealed, I grinned ear to ear. On one level, it seemed so obvious, so perfect for Ticket to Ride Legacy, that of course the game was going to include it. On the other hand, I certainly hadn't anticipated that it was coming -- and I can't say for certain that I, had I been tasked with creating a Ticket to Ride Legacy, would have thought of it.
But while Ticket to Ride Legacy certainly has its clever ideas and enjoyable elements, I do also have reservations about the experience overall. Competitive legacy board games are hard. Really hard. Balancing things so that one or two players don't build out an early advantage in the campaign and ride it to victory over the remaining games is very much at odds with the idea that the decisions you make in one playthrough will have an important, lasting impact in later plays. It's a target with an impossibly small bullseye, and I cannot say that Ticket to Ride Legacy hits it.
Another issue is that the game gets uncomfortably complex in the middle of the campaign -- shockingly so for a board game that is fundamentally something as "easy" for "real gamers" as Ticket to Ride. I mentioned earlier that the design had a clever way to control the growth of complexity. I think that method doesn't do so enough, at least not for the pace at which significant new mechanics are brought into the campaign. For a period of several games in the heart of our campaign, all the players struggled to remember the many consequences that could result from a single action. This caused frustration no matter how we handled it, be it allowing someone to roll back later to do the things they'd forgotten, insisting we not do that, or trying to handhold fellow players through the 3 or 4 possible consequences of their turn (assuming somebody else even remembered them all).
And while I was generally positive on the experience when the whole campaign was said and done, at least one of our group of four was actually miserable -- continuing to play only so we could all complete the thing, and despairing of having any fun for many, many games before it was all over. (Watching a friend be so unhappy playing a board game he felt obligated to continue playing certainly wasn't fun, regardless of whatever other fun I might have derived from the experience.)
So all told, I think I would give Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West a B. Despite how great the original Ticket to Ride is for introducing people to the wide world of gaming beyond the likes of Monopoly and Sorry, I'm not sure this game would be a casual gamer's best introduction to legacy games. But if you have enjoyed other legacy games, I'd bet this one would at least be worth consideration for your gaming group.
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