Ticket to Ride: Life Lessons on a Board (Content Challenge #8)

Our family is hooked on the popular board game, Ticket to Ride. We like the travel theme, the variety of maps, all those little trains and stations, and the nuances that make each board similar but different. We play often when we get the opportunity and have experimented with numerous strategies. The concentration is palpable, and the competition is intense.

I don't know if Alan Moon, the game's developer, had this as a goal, but he designed a game that also teaches valuable lessons about life. Content Challenge #8 explores how Ticket to Ride presents life lessons on a board. 

Blocked Roots and Life Lessons

Is my imagination working overtime, or does life mirror what happens on a Ticket to Ride game board? What can we learn about life while playing a table game? Here are a few suggestions:

Plans don't always work out. Robert Burns was right. "The best-laid plans of mice and men go oft awry." If you've played the game even once, you know that your well-laid plans can go horribly wrong in a single round of play. And, the likelihood of disaster increases as the number of players increases. Don't these things happen regularly in real life?
Some blocked plans can be salvaged by making a detour. For example, say that you're the green player in the picture. You kept the destination card going from Helena to Santa Fe. Your original plans to go straight through were thwarted immediately when the yellow player claimed the route from Denver to Santa Fe on his first play. Other players blocked the shorter detours. So, your route to Santa Fe from Helena will include a significant detour through Phoenix. It's not optimal, but still possible.

Has something similar ever happened to you? Of course, it has.  You're chugging along smoothly toward your destination in a relationship, job, or course of training. Suddenly,  you face an obstacle such as illness or financial setback and are forced to detour. Your way isn't completely blocked, but it's significantly altered.  

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Some blocked plans don't offer any detours that get you to your original goal. In the game of Ticket to Ride--and in life--plans sometimes have to be abandoned. The idea that held so much promise fizzled when the Great Recession hit. The venture with the strong financial projections in 2019 cost you most of your savings when COVID came and stayed. After trying your best, you fail to finish your education. In these cases, you're forced to focus on another route.

In the picture above, you see that all the routes into Munchen are claimed. When the yellow player--who was working her way from Cadiz on the southwest corner of the map up to Munchen--saw that, she knew that destination card was impossible to complete. Life is like that, too, sometimes. 

​Waiting for details to work out can be excruciating. You need only one more red card to complete a route and end the game. Victory is within reach--if you can just get a red card. Maybe you'll draw a red train card--or a wild card--just in time to win the game; maybe you won't. Either way, waiting is tough.

Learning to look at a problem from several perspectives can help you discover a  solution. Suppose that you've drawn extra destination tickets. All of them look impossible. Then, you tilt your head in a different direction and notice a "backdoor" path that will allow you to complete a long route using only 4 trains. The solution was "hiding in plain sight." You just needed a different perspective to find it. 

I see you nodding your heads as you recall times in real life when, after examining a problem for a long time, you suddenly "saw " a solution. Perspective can make all the difference. 

The most difficult routes often reap big payoffs. My husband and I frequently play the Nordic Countries version of Ticket to Ride. It's designed for 2 or 3 players and features trains, tokens, and cards in unusual colors; you see them pictured below. The section from Lieksa to Murmansk is 9 trains long. You have to be brave to try it, but if you make it, you earn 27 points for your effort!  Life's that way, too. Accomplishing a challenging task often yields huge rewards on several levels. 

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Today's CTA

Here's today's call-to-action:
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You Accept the CHallenge, Too!

I intentionally ignored one of the most obvious lessons about game-playing and  life:

Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. It's trite but true. The important thing is that you keep chugging along. What's your strategy for winning or losing well? Could you verbalize it?

If you're a Ticket to Ride fan, you may have ideas about how Ticket to Ride presents life lessons on a board. I would love to hear them.