The tabletop game comes to Live with a clean but bare-bones presentation.
In Ticket to Ride, you play trains on various routes through the US, the goal being to have the most points, either through route length alone or by completing Destination tickets. But you need colored train cards to be able to claim routes, which you have to draw off the deck or from a public pool. When one player's trains are gone, the game ends and scores are tallied.
There's a ton of strategy to be had playing against humans, and the AI is sufficiently dastardly without being Madden-AI cheap.
The graphics are not the best they could be, as they're maximized for HD televisions, making the 70% of us still playing on SD TVs have to strain our eyes to read the text on some of the smaller graphics and cards. There are a few animations of zeppelins coasting across the country and such, but nothing distracting, no bright colors or flashing anything.
The sounds are clean and crisp, but there is no music whatsoever; you'll have to plug your iPod into the XBox during marathon TtR sessions to keep yourself aurally stimulated. Controls are fairly intuitive, with just the right amount of redundancy controls- not too much to slow down play, not too few so that you accidentally do something wrong. Without a turn time limit, though, you're free to go your own pace and make sure everything's set up the way you like it.
With DLC already being released for this game and local multiplayer offered, it's a sure buy, since there's so many different ways to play- online, local and single-player. And if that doesn't convince you, consider this: The actual cardboard-map game, available in stores, runs $40. At 800 points, this game is the best steal of the year.