Ticket to Ride Legacy tosses American history in the trash, and it’s better for it
25.09.2023 - 16:35
/ polygon.com
Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West brings together a powerful trio of award-winning designers — the original creator of Ticket to Ride, Alan R. Moon; the creator of Pandemic, Matt Leacock; and the inventor of the legacy genre of board games, Rob Daviau. Together, after five long years of development, these men have achieved something remarkable. Ticket to Ride Legacy is nothing less than the reinvention of the classic board game first released in 2004, and likely the start of a whole new franchise for its owner, board game giant Asmodee.
Moreover, it was accomplished without the slavish attention to historical detail so common in modern economics-themed board games — a niche format with a penchant for fetishizing raw capitalism above all else. In its place are the beginnings of a joyful and fantastical new world, one that I can’t wait to explore further with my friends and family.
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To perform this feat, Legends of the West employs a bit of a bait and switch. It begins with just a partial map of the United States of America circa 1865 — conveniently the same year that the American Civil War ended. Judging by the lay of the land, in any other game it would be time to begin the business of Reconstruction, where a generation of wealthy men with cash on hand snatched up lucrative train lines in an orgiastic display of industrial progress. And with virtually any other train-themed board game, that’s where the focus of the experience would lie: taking turns placing train lines, forcibly displacing a largely invisible Native American population already living there, all while exploiting imported labor to do it on the cheap.
So instead of retelling American history, Legends of the West tosses it right out the window.
In its place is a transcontinental mystery, with players expanding outward across a landscape that, by the end of 12 linked games, displays only a passing resemblance to our United States of America and portions of its nearest neighbors. Legends of the West is, in all seriousness, an elaborate hunt to bring a meddlesome murderer to justice. And while that narrative hook is only paper thin, it’s just enough of a distraction to hang a lampshade on a hugely problematic chapter in our nation’s history.
And what a very nice lampshade it is, one that preserves Ticket to Ride’s