Ticket to Ride: Alvin and Dexter expansion review
Ticket to Ride is an extremely popular board game.
It’s also considered a “gateway game” – one which is easy to understand, has strategic decisions to be made, elements of luck to keep things interesting, some good tension, and hooks people into playing board games.
And because of its fun and popularity, Days of Wonder has published a wide number of Ticket to Ride board games. We wouldn’t really consider them all expansions because they don’t build upon each other, but rather we’d call them extensions – taking the same basic game play and extending it to other games in the same line.
As we’ve written recently about Carcassonne, Pandemic, and Memoir ’44, they all require the base game to play any associated expansions. Until 2011, most of the Ticket to Ride games are standalone games that are played independently.
For Ticket to Ride that means additional of areas of the world:
Starting in 2011, Days of Wonder started publishing a series of true Ticket to Ride expansions that require one of the base games to play. These are released as Map Collections – of which there are currently 3:
Ticket to Ride Alvin and Dexter
In 2011, Days of Wonder also departed from their normal Ticket to Ride games when they published – Alvin and Dexter: A Ticket to Ride Monster Expansion. You can play Alvin and Dexter with any of the Ticket to Ride games. So no matter which Ticket to Ride game you have, you can change up the experience with Alvin and Dexter.
Now this may seem like a crazy thing to add to a train game, but Alvin is an alien and Dexter is a dinosaur. And just like that crazy addition would suggest, the Alvin and Dexter expansion mixes up the game play with an added touch of direct competition.
Alvin and Dexter move around spreading chaos. Any city a monster is on becomes a “city in chaos”. And while a city is in chaos, no one can build a route into our out of that city. It’s a great way to block or slow down your opponents. It also creates a very direct conflict between players.
Normally in Ticket to Ride you can only directly affect opponents by building on a route they may want. But with Alvin and Dexter, you don’t need to spend your trains building in areas you may not need just to mess up your opponent’s plans. Just move those monster around.
And not only are the monsters available to move for fun and blocking, but the game actually encourages it. Players are rewarded for moving Alvin and Dexter. The players who move each monster most will get 10 points at the end of the game.
How to move Alvin and Dexter
Moving Alvin and Dexter is very simple. As an additional action on a turn, players can play a locomotive card to move either Alvin or Dexter up to 3 cities away. Players can also play 2 locomotive cards to move a monster up to 6 cities away. While players are limited to playing only 1 or 2 cards, that’s still enough to move them far away and surprise an unsuspecting opponent.
Actually, when playing with Alvin and Dexter I think everyone is suspicious the whole time.
The cost of using the monster to thwart your opponents is a locomotive card. And in Ticket to Ride, locomotive cards are very valuable because they’re wild cards. So using a locomotive card to move a monster is very deliberate. As such, Alvin and Dexter definitely create more tension in the game.
There’s also a helpful way to use those locomotive cards on a monster. Since moving a monster is an additional action, it can be done either before or after a normal action. So a player could move a monster from a city before connecting a route into or out of that city.
More Damage
But that’s not all there is to Alvin and Dexter. At the end of the game, any Destination Ticket showing a city that has either monter in it will only be worth half the points. So at the end of the game when players are rushing to place their final routes, they’re also keeping an eye on where Alvin and Dexter might end up. Or better yet, they’re plotting where to move them to cut their opponent’s score.
Final Thoughts
Alvin and Dexter add a nice twist to Ticket to Ride. It’s a simple expansion but adds a unique twist to the game and gives it a different feel. So while we won’t let the monsters run amuck every time we play Ticket to Ride, we’re glad we have this mini-expansion for when we want a little more “gotcha” in our game.
Like we’ve mentioned, Ticket to Ride is a fantastic family board game. But if you ever feel like there isn’t much player interaction in the game, then definitely pick up a copy of Alvin and Dexter – it will get you the added element you’re looking for.
There is something about the sound of this that just doesn’t sit well with me.
The mechanics sound fine, but the monster theme just doesn’t jell. I think I’d prefer something a little more down to earth like a railway worker’s strike or something.
Mind you, I’m sure my kids would like the monsters better, so what do I know.
Dan – that’s what we thought at first as well. Monsters seemed pretty off-theme. But we do like the light-hearted idea that monsters in a train game give over something more thematic.