Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West Proves There’s Still Life in Legacy Games

By Keith Law | March 24, 2025 | 11:00am

Video Games Reviews board games

Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West Proves There’s Still Life in Legacy Games

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Legacy games are tough to pull off; they require a lot of writing and creativity, for one thing, but they also need to add something to the base game they’re altering to make into a legacy title. (Original legacy games, like Charterstone, are in their own little niche.) The announcement in 2023 that there was a Ticket to Ride Legacy game coming seemed more like a cash-grab than anything else, since Ticket to Ride itself is such a lovely, simple game, one that you can teach in five minutes and that works with players of almost all ages—one that turning this into a legacy game would likely rob of everything that makes it work.

Of course, I’m saying all of that as a preface to a glowing review, because Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West is actually fantastic in just about every way. Honestly, my only complaint here is that there’s too much good content included in the box; you do hit a point between games six and eight (the whole campaign is 12 games) where you will probably have a lot of new rules in play at once, and managing all of that is a tiny, tiny hassle. It’s still really true to the spirit and feel of the original, and also brings in a few of the twists we’ve seen in the eleventy expansions and spinoffs that have followed the base game.

When you begin Ticket to Ride Legacy, you’re working just in the northeast portion of the United States in the years right after the Civil War. After each game, you’ll add a new part of the map of the U.S., and then will open a box that adds some new rules and cards to whatever you’re already working with—the order in which you add these things changes your experience, but it’s designed in such a way that any order will work. I won’t spoil any of the specifics of the new boards and boxes, but I can say that some of these are mechanics we’ve seen in other Ticket to Ride games or boards, and some are entirely new.

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One of the new mechanics that’s in play from the start is that tickets, the route cards you try to complete for points in each game, can expire. Some are removed from the game permanently if they’ve been completed once; some are removed if the same player completes them twice. And some of these tickets then give the player who “retires” them a bonus in the form of a “postcard,” which then becomes part of their permanent stash and can give ongoing benefits or limited-use bonuses or end-game points. This helps freshen up the stack of tickets as you move along, removing some of the shorter routes that are limited to the northeast and make more room in the deck for new, longer routes that add destinations from the newer parts of the board.

Ticket to Ride Legacy

Another key difference here is that you don’t get points for placing trains on the board. All of your points in the game come from completed tickets (routes), plus a bonus for how few trains you have left, and possibly some bonuses from postcards. The scoring is actually simpler and, I think, better in many ways, although different boards give you reasons to try to play longer segments just as the regular game rewards that with more points as you go.

This is a mild spoiler, but not long into the campaign, players will get to add Employee cards, choosing a new one each game, with the last-place finisher getting the President card as a bonus second employee. These cards give you something new for that specific game, something that can be as simple as starting the game with more train cards or as involved as giving you extra bonuses during the game every time you play cards to a white route.

At its core, this is still Ticket to Ride. The way you play the original—collecting cards in certain colors so you can hand in a set to place trains on a matching set of racks—is the way you play the legacy game. That allows for a very easy transition into this new version, especially for the first one or two sessions, after which you’ll start adding new rules and components. (Here’s another spoiler: The game comes with a hole puncher, so there’s actually something here you’ll be able to keep and use even once you’ve completed the campaign.) Some of the rules and mechanics you add as you go are a little more involved, and one is even a little silly, but they all work and nothing here is too far afield from the spirit of the original.

As for where this stands among legacy games, I know Pandemic Legacy is the consensus all-time leader, although I found that game a little too involved for a good co-op experience; you have to play that with serious players who know the original and are a little bit hardcore. I’d put this up there with Clank! Legacy, at least the first season, as legacy games that stay true to the feel and accessibility of the original while still keeping the game fun and interesting as you move through a campaign. It’s a steep investment, coming in near $100, but if you love Ticket to Ride, you’re going to enjoy the legacy version, and you’ll get a minimum of 12 real plays out of it.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.