In my last few entries, I talked about how I distilled the information from Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries and designed the Ticket to Ride: Iceland board. In this post, I’m going to discuss the last part of the process, creating the deck of Ticket Cards. I tried to describe this to Cam last time he was over, and I completely flubbed it, so here it is written in detail.

First, on the card design, I used the back of the Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries cards, and did a small modification to change “Father Christmas Tour 1910” to “Golden Circle Tour 2525”. I wanted to set this game in the future since there aren’t really any cross-country rails in Iceland currently. Instead, I projected some point in the future when railed mass transit is possible in Iceland and what that might look like. Finally, I love the song “In the Year 2525 (Exortium and Terminus)” by Zager and Evans, so it’s my own personal in-joke.

Continue reading Designing Ticket to Ride: Iceland, Part 3 →

In my last blog, I described how I broke down Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries into a statistical model that I could use in the design of Ticket to Ride: Iceland. In this one, I’ll look at how I started to build up the board and what the main challenges were.

The first thing I needed was a base layer that approximately matched the proportions of the Nordic Countries board. I found a very nice physical map on wikimedia commons, which did the trick. The nice thing about this particular map was that it was not really high contrast, and would allow me to easily put place labels and other imagery that would stand out.

Before I even started placement of cities or tracks on the board, I did some research. I needed to know what the major cities of Iceland were, where they were located, what geologic features I should keep an eye out for, and what some of the major roads were. I should call out that Iceland does not have an extensive rail network – I knew this going in, but instead envisioned a future where the Icelandic people had developed a mass-transit system with zero-environmental impact, had the capability to withstand the geologic stresses of the region, and looked like classic trains.

Continue reading Designing Ticket to Ride: Iceland, Part 2 →

Ticket to Ride: Iceland was quite a departure from my normal comfort zone in game design. Previously, I have done construction of existing rules (Arkham Horror League play), play aids (Pathfinder ACG Location Card Holder) or small extensions of existing games (Breach: Pirates and Planets). This is really the next iteration on that path in that I had a rule set to follow (Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries), but I was effectively creating a new game that followed that rule set. Therefore, the first thing I really had to do, was to try to understand the existing rule set and try to glean what made it interesting. To begin understanding the rule set, I needed a mechanism to organize and visualize the patterns of those rules – for me, the tool of choice for this task was Microsoft Excel.

I started by cataloging every length of track from Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries. Namely, for each track, I cataloged: the two cities it connected, the length, the color, whether it shared the path with another track, whether it was a tunnel, and how many ferry segments it contained.

Continue reading Designing Ticket to Ride: Iceland, Part 1 →

My big project lately has been a redesign of an existing board game. My stated goal was to take Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries and design a new board and ticket cards for Iceland. In this case, I wanted to use all the same common components (train markers, train cards, etc), but have a completely new game on the back of the existing board.

The following shows the results of the construction. I’ll describe the design work (read: spreadsheets) in a later post.

Continue reading Ticket to Ride: Iceland →