Ticket To Ride-First Journey is the junior variation of the popular Ticket To Ride game.
As in the original, players must make various lengths of train route connections between cities across the U.S. and Canada in order to complete secretly drawn route goals. Coloured cards are collected from a communal draw pile, and when players have enough of the right colour to claim a specific route to help connect their needed cities, they “spend” those cards to place their own 3D train cars on the route and claim it.
This serves to not only help make their needed city connections, but when a route is full, can cause other players to need to build around the unavailable route to complete their own goals. Happily, you aren’t stuck with the goals; they can be traded in order to draw completely new ones which may have goals that are more easily achieved, and which the players have sometimes already completed.
The first player to complete six route goals wins.
As with other junior versions of games, this one always ends up being a pretty close race all the way to the end. You likely won’t know until the last goal is done who will win, and the tight race makes the victory taste even sweeter. Very well geared for kids.
Uno–coming up on 50 years old–was first invented to established fixed rules for household games of Crazy Eights, which is something I can appreciate, since everyone plays it slightly differently.
Rather than dealing with card suits, Uno cards are coloured, with special cards clearly indicating when, for instance, you switch directions of play or when the following player has to pick up two cards.
Some blank wild cards are supplied, which can offer a fun twist (or crazy, depending on the people involved).
After playing a single card per turn on like colours or numbers–picking up a single card from the communal deck if you can’t play, and whenever other players’ cards force you to–the first player out of cards is the winner.
If you’re tired of the usual discussion about how friends or other families play Crazy Eights once you’ve decided to play it, grabbing a pack of Uno may be a quick and easy solution. Of course, you may still want to play your own variations of it, because, c’mon… those stacking “pick up two cards” plays can get pretty fun.