Best Games Like Ticket to Ride

First work out what you actually liked about it

Ticket to Ride won the Spiel des Jahres in 2004, took the Origins Award for best board game the same year, then picked up the As d'Or and the Diana Jones Award in 2005. It has sold more than 20 million copies. On BoardGameGeek it holds a 7.4 average across just under 100,000 user ratings with a complexity score of 1.8 out of 5, which is about as light as a game can be while still asking you to think.

That popularity hides something useful: the game is doing three separate things at once, and most people who love it only love one or two of them. There is the collecting rhythm, where a hand of matching cards builds slowly toward one satisfying claim. There is the private goal, where your destination tickets give you a secret agenda nobody else can see and a real risk of ending the game with a penalty. And there is the shared map, where the route you have been quietly saving up for disappears because somebody else took it first.

Nearly every recommendation below is stronger on one of those three axes and weaker on another, so decide which one you are shopping for before you spend anything. If the answer is the collecting rhythm, you do not need a train game at all. If it is the map, you need something with genuine blocking, and several of the most commonly recommended alternatives quietly do not have any.

The best next box is often still a Ticket to Ride box

Our first recommendation for most groups is the one people skip because it feels like buying the same game twice. Ticket to Ride: Europe adds tunnels that can cost you extra cards, ferries that require locomotives, and train stations that let you borrow one opponent's route at the cost of end-game points. Those three additions fix the base game's flattest problem, which is that a player who gets blocked early has very little recourse. Europe rates a 7.5 on BoardGameGeek against the original's 7.4, at effectively the same complexity and the same 30 to 60 minutes, and it is the version we set up by default.

If you are buying the classic United States map today, check the printing. A 2025 refresh of the original box is now on shelves with 33 destination tickets, larger cards, a redesigned rulebook, new cover art, and one real rules change: you now start by drawing four tickets and keeping at least two, rather than three and two. It stays compatible with the existing expansions. It is a better version of the same game, and it is worth a moment at checkout to see which one a listing is actually selling.

Two other boxes in the family are worth knowing about. Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West, from 2023, is a twelve-game campaign designed by Rob Daviau, Matt Leacock and Alan R. Moon in which opening sealed boxes unlocks new rules as the story moves west. It sits at 8.6 on BoardGameGeek across more than 7,000 ratings, which makes it the highest-rated thing in the family by a wide margin, but it is a commitment: one story, one group, twelve sessions, and a complexity closer to 2.6 than the original's 1.8. Ticket to Ride: Rails and Sails, from 2016, goes the other direction, adding ships and a 60 to 120 minute running time for people who want the same game to last a whole evening.

Two more are widely misunderstood, so we will be blunt about them. The small city boxes, New York, London, Amsterdam and San Francisco, are 2 to 4 player games that run 10 to 15 minutes. They are excellent openers and terrible main events, and buying one expecting a full Ticket to Ride evening is a mistake we have watched people make. And Map Collection Volume 8: Iberia and South Korea, released in 2024, is an expansion rather than a standalone game: it needs the base game or Europe to work. For younger players, Ticket to Ride: Ghost Train is a 2 to 4 player, 15 to 30 minute version rated for ages 6 and up.

The closest replacements draw the network instead of claiming it

If what you liked was the route-building itself, the games that get closest are not train games with a board and plastic trains. They are flip-and-write games where every player draws their own network at the same time. Next Station: London is the best of them. Matthew Dunstan's 2022 design for Blue Orange has you redrawing the London Underground across four coloured lines, revealing a station card each turn that dictates where your next stretch of track can go. It plays 1 to 4 in about 25 minutes, rates 7.4 on BoardGameGeek at a complexity of 1.5, was one of three games nominated for the Spiel des Jahres in 2023, and won Best Family Game at the UK Games Expo the same year.

The reason we recommend it so often is downtime. Everyone draws simultaneously, so a four-player game takes exactly as long as a two-player game, and the fiddly wait that makes Ticket to Ride drag at five players simply does not exist. The honest trade-off is that nobody can block anyone. If the shared map was your favourite part, this is the wrong direction and you should skip to the next section.

The series has grown since: Next Station: Paris arrived in 2024 and Next Station: Berlin in 2026. They are standalone games rather than expansions, so any of them works as a first purchase, but we would still start with London. Berlin is genuinely new, with only around a hundred BoardGameGeek ratings as we write this, which is far too thin a sample to draw a conclusion from. Railroad Ink: Deep Blue Edition covers similar ground with dice instead of cards, from designers Hjalmar Hach and Lorenzo Silva, and it handles 1 to 6 players in 20 to 30 minutes, which is a genuinely useful player count in this category.

Route games with a real board and real blocking

If the shared map is the part you want back, two games do it without asking much more of your group than Ticket to Ride does. TransAmerica, Franz-Benno Delonge's 2001 design, is the purest version: every player has five cities to connect, but everyone builds on the same track network, so your rails help your opponents and theirs help you. Games run about 30 minutes, it handles 2 to 6 players, it was nominated for the Spiel des Jahres in 2002 and named a Mensa Select in 2003. It is far more cut-throat than its gentle presentation suggests, and it is the cheapest way we know to get the tension of a shared board.

Trekking the World swaps trains for a globe-trotting race, and here the edition matters more than the title. The first edition, from 2020, was a set-collection and racing game. The second edition, published by Underdog Games in 2024 with a redesign by Nick Bentley, replaced that with a drafting system: you choose from an itinerary of five face-up cards, destinations grant free powers that combo with one another, and a solo mode was added. It plays 1 to 5 in 30 to 60 minutes. The two editions are different enough that a recommendation for one is not a recommendation for the other, so buy the second edition deliberately rather than whichever copy is cheapest.

If it was the collecting rhythm and not the trains

Plenty of people who love Ticket to Ride do not actually care about railways. What they like is the loop of taking a small thing each turn until you have enough small things to do one big thing. That loop is everywhere in modern gateway games, and some of the best boxes in the hobby run on it.

Splendor is the most direct translation: collect gem tokens, buy cards, watch those cards make future purchases cheaper, and finish in about 30 minutes. Azul, Michael Kiesling's 2017 design and the Spiel des Jahres winner in 2018, keeps the drafting tension and adds the thing Splendor lacks, which is the ability to hand an opponent tiles they cannot use. Kingdomino, Bruno Cathala's Spiel des Jahres winner from 2017, is the lightest option here at 15 to 25 minutes and a complexity of just 1.2, and it teaches in about two minutes. Carcassonne, the 2001 Spiel des Jahres winner, remains the reference point for tile placement, with more than 140,000 BoardGameGeek ratings behind it.

If you want only one box from this section, we recommend Cascadia. Randy Flynn's 2021 design for Flatout Games and AEG won the Spiel des Jahres in 2022, plays 1 to 4 in 30 to 45 minutes, and asks you to solve two puzzles at once: place habitat tiles so terrain connects, and place wildlife tokens so animals score. It sits at 7.9 on BoardGameGeek across more than 56,000 ratings, which is the highest rating of any game in this article outside the Legacy campaign, and its solo mode means the box still earns shelf space on a night nobody else shows up.

One step up, for a group that has outgrown it

Sometimes the problem is not the theme, it is that Ticket to Ride has stopped being interesting after fifty plays. Three games make a sensible next rung without jumping straight to a four-hour evening.

Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2016 for designers Andreas Pelikan and Alexander Pfister. You draw tiles, set your own prices for them, and discover that an opponent will happily buy the tile you overvalued. It runs 30 to 50 minutes at a complexity of 2.3, which is a real step up from 1.8 but still a weeknight game.

Airlines Europe is the sentimental pick, because it is Alan R. Moon's own bigger game. Published in 2011, it descends from his 1990 design Airlines and its 1999 successor Union Pacific, and it swaps routes for airline shares: you expand carriers on a map of Europe while quietly buying stock in the ones you plan to grow. It runs about 75 minutes at a complexity of 2.4. Beyond that, Concordia is the genuine jump, at a complexity of 3.0 and roughly 100 minutes, and it is rated 8.1 across more than 46,000 BoardGameGeek ratings. It still has a map and still has network expansion, so the shape is familiar even though the depth is not.

Check the box, not just the title

Almost every game in this article has a near-namesake that plays differently, and the player count or the ruleset is often the only thing separating them. These are the ones we see people get wrong:

• Ticket to Ride and Ticket to Ride: Europe are separate standalone games, not a base and an expansion. Europe is the one we recommend first.
• The classic United States map exists in older printings and a 2025 refresh with 33 tickets and a draw-four-keep-two opening. Both are fine; only one is current.
• New York, London, Amsterdam and San Francisco are the 10 to 15 minute city boxes for 2 to 4 players, not full-size games.
• Map Collection Volume 8: Iberia and South Korea is an expansion and needs the base game or Europe to play.
• Trekking the World's first edition is set collection and racing; the 2024 second edition is drafting and racing. They are not interchangeable.
• Next Station: London, Paris, Tokyo and Berlin are all standalone games rather than expansions of one another.
• Cascadia has a Junior version, a Landmarks expansion and roll-and-write spin-offs. The award winner is the plain original box.

Our short list

• Best next box overall: Ticket to Ride: Europe, for tunnels, ferries and stations that give a blocked player options
• Best route-building replacement: Next Station: London, simultaneous play with no downtime and no blocking
• Best for the shared-map tension: TransAmerica, where everyone builds on one network and 30 minutes is plenty
• Best globe-trotting alternative: Trekking the World: Second Edition, and specifically the 2024 redesign
• Best if you liked the rhythm, not the trains: Cascadia, with Azul, Splendor, Kingdomino and Carcassonne close behind
• Best step up: Isle of Skye, then Airlines Europe from Ticket to Ride's own designer, then Concordia
• Best long-haul project: Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West, twelve linked games and the family's highest rating
• Skip unless you know what you are buying: the 10 to 15 minute city boxes as a main event, and Map Collection expansions with no base map

The reason Ticket to Ride has lasted twenty years and is now heading to Netflix is that it does three simple things well at once. That is also why no single game replaces it, and why the useful question is which of those three things you want more of. Pick that first, buy for it deliberately, and check which edition you are actually ordering. Every game linked below has a full how-to-play guide here on the site, so you can teach your next one in about the time it takes to deal the first hand.

Games Mentioned