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(More customer reviews)Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries is the same fun boardgame as the others in this series (don't bother with the dice or card version, however). What makes Nordic Countries different is that it combines and revises some of the more advanced rules from both Ticket to Ride Europe and Ticket to Ride Switzerland Map Expansion. You get ferry and tunnel routes like Europe and the locomotives are only usable on them from Switzerland. Ferry routes all require one or two locomotives to build. Unlike Europe or Switzerland, you can "crush cards" when building ferries by "crushing" 3 of any single color card into a locomotive and some of the ferries require you to use cards of a specific color. Tunnels operate the same as Europe; when you try to build one, flip the top 3 cards from the draw pile over; if any of them are the same color as the route you are trying to build or are locomotives, then you need that many extra cards of that same color and/or locomotives in order to build the tunnel. You also get a new vertical game board and ticket cards, of course, depicting Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland (plus a bit of Russia), as well as a bonus 10 point Globetrotter ticket awarded to the player with the most tickets completed at the end of the game. There is no longest route bonus as in the original game or Europe. The new map has a lot of short routes in the south and long routes in the north (including a 9 train route that is incredibly tough to build since locomotives do not act as wild cards on normal routes in this version). There are several diabolical choke-points up north where you can screw over the other players by cutting them off while other areas in the south (the big cities) have a ton of ways into them. You can expect a real challenge from this map and its new rule tweaks.
Like the out-of-print Switzerland, Nordic Countries is only playable by 2-3 players; if you are playing with 3 people then you can use the double routes just as in 4-5 player versions of the other games in this series. Once again, Days of Wonder delivers a deceptively simple, fun but challenging game sure to provide years of entertainment. Production values are durable, beautiful and excellent as usual except well over half of the tickets are confusing. Many of the vertical destination tickets have names of the cities listed in order of south to north or right to left, which is the reverse of how one would expect to read them, and this takes quite a bit of getting used to (note that the Marklin edition of Ticket to Ride, which also uses a vertical map, does not seem to have this problem with its destination tickets). I suppose the logic behind the decision is that the south is the heavily populated region with more available routes but it comes across to me as an incredibly bad design choice. Usually, big cities are listed first on a ticket so maybe that is part of the logic but it took actively staring at the cards and comparing them to the map to finally see some method to the madness. And it is madness, because every single player I've gamed with was totally confused by the tickets that had the aforementioned issues in game after game. Okay, so maybe Days of Wonder can say it's not a screw-up but a design choice, except the rule is not even applied consistently. A few tickets do not follow it. Another problem, which cannot be played off as a design choice, is that all seven of the tickets leading to Finland's capital of Helsinki erroneously point inland to Lahti, the city directly above it. I'm not happy with the destination tickets; they cause unnecessary confusion and time-wasting in what is otherwise an excellent game. It does does get a little bit easier once you play enough games and familiarize yourself with the foreign names and locations of the cities. Days of Wonder customer service didn't seem to care or even consider the tickets an issue when I contacted them.
Nordic Countries is especially handy for when I can't get 4-5 people to play (so we can use the double routes), but I am taking off one star from my review for the ridiculous ticket confusion. Regardless of the problem, after playing several games of it, I still prefer Ticket to Ride Europe (with the Days of Wonder Ticket to Ride 1912 Expansion) because the locomotives are true wild cards and it adds three stations per player you can place to avoid being cut-off by your opponents. However, there is nothing to stop you from adding the station rules to Nordic Countries or any other edition. In fact, I recommend it if you like your games a bit less cut-throat, although the station colors may not match up depending on which edition you are trying to integrate them into; different editions of the game use different colors for their trains (Nordic uses black, purple and white, for example). I also like the variety of Days of Wonder Ticket To Ride - Marklin which adds passengers for an extra layer of crazy bonus point scoring strategy, although this edition can be a bit fiddly due to the extra rules and probably shouldn't be your introduction to the Ticket To Ride series. The original Ticket to Ride is the simplest version but also the most frustratingly cut-throat unless you also get the Days of Wonder Ticket to Ride 1910 Expansion which gives you a lot more choices on tickets and customizing the rules to suit your group's play style (but it's still probably the most cut-throat edition even with the expansion).
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Please Note: This special edition version of Nordic Countries is available for only a limited time and in limited quantities. It is already sold out at Days of Wonder. There are no current plans for a second printing.World-wide fan demand prompts release of English, French and German language editions of TtR: Nordic Countries. This 2-3 player version in the award winning Ticket to Ride board game series was previously available only in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Finnish languages.Ticket to Ride Nordic Countries takes you on a Nordic adventure through Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden as you travel to the great northern cities of Copenhagen, Oslo, Helsinki and Stockholm. Visit Norway's beautiful fjords and the magnificent mountain scenery on the Rauma Railway. Breathe in the salt air of the busy Swedish ports on the Baltic Sea. Ride through the Danish countryside where Vikings once walked. Hop-on the Finnish railway and travel across the Arctic Circle to the land of the Midnight Sun.Players collect cards of various types of train cars that enable them to claim railway routes and pass through tunnels and onto ferries, as they connect cities throughout the Nordic Countries.As with previous versions, the game remains elegant, can be learned in 5 minutes and provides hours of fun for families and experienced gamers alike.Ticket to Ride Nordic Countries is a complete board game designed specifically for 2 or 3 players.
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