Fans of the board game will not be let down!
The game follows the exact rules of the real the game. Which is wonderful since the game itself is so stellarly simple it's mind boggling. You collected colored cards so that you can lay "track" across the country. Each track section is 1 or more colored spaces. You need the respective amount of matching colored cards to lay that track. That's pretty much the game there. Like I said, stellarly simple. The longer the piece of track laid, the more points you get for it. It's nice and straight forward like that.
Add in these nifty little Trip Tickets. Trip Tickets are like secret missions, nobody knows what you have, nor do you know what they have. The trip ticket will tell you to connect two cities on the map. If you connect those two cities with one contiguous line of track, you get the points for that ticket. However, if you are not able to complete a Trip Ticket, you are PENALIZED those points at the end of the game. It's a way of keeping Trip Ticket Horders under check. Bonus points are awarded to the player that has the longest unbroken track. Most times this bonus could be enough to push a player over the edge and to victory!
Here comes the strategy; if you notice another player is making his way from one city or another, you can block his route by laying down track in his way, forcing him to take an alternate route around your track and thus really really getting under his skin. With the XBox Live Vision cam turned on during the game you will see a miriad of happy faces when you do that!
All in all, Ticket to Ride is a honest reproduciton of the physical board game. If you're a fan of strategy games you won't be sorry you spent your 800 msp on this little gem.