The Bavaria/Marklin edition of Ticket to Ride stands alone from the basic (United States) and Europe editions of the game, both in the narrow sense that it is not an "expansion set" to those games, but also in the broader sense that it's a lot more than just the old game with a different map. The rules are fairly similar, so learning all three games only takes a modest amount of time, but the differences across the games alter the strategies a fair bit. Each one feels like a distinct experience.

For those unfamiliar with the series, here's what they all have in common: There is a game board indicating routes among a bunch of cities. The object of the game is to amass the most points, and in one way or another those points come from collecting the routes strategically. Collecting any route between two places will generate points, but each player holds Ticket Cards indicating longer routes of special importance to that person, and stringing together little routes to make this longer connection adds to the payoff (whereas failing to do so imposes a penalty). How do the players take possession of routes? They take turns drawing cards that, when collected into sets, determine which routes they can use, and eventually they start using those cards to claim routes. The main random element is the timing of when those cards turn up in the deck.

The Bavaria/Marklin edition contains a few differences from the other two, but the main new feature is the introduction of Passengers. Each player gets three little plastic guys who can be sent for a ride along the railway, collecting points at each town/city visited. The longer a player's rail, other things equal, the more points the little fellow can collect. But the value of visiting a town/city drops each time, so there's a nice tension between wanting to send them early (while the places are more valuable) and send them late (when more places have been connected). The addition of this rule (and the large number of points associated with it) really alters the strategy from the other two editions.

I don't know that I've done the games justice. They're truly outstanding. You don't have to care a whit about trains. Even small children can enjoy these games, as long as they focus on the pleasure of successfully connecting things instead of focusing on beating the older players. (A suggestion: Keep a pad of paper in the box and track the child's points so that the competition is personal rather than with the adults.) The pace is especially fast, as each player takes turns drawing cards or claiming routes. (My family likes to play a board game while we eat but this one moves so quickly that we have a hard time doing both at the same time.) The boards are gorgeous, the pieces colorful and sturdy. We have just been thrilled with these purchases.

I guess I'll end with a single criticism, only because it's related to the hazy word choice I had to use here. For whatever reason -- I won't speculate why -- the designers pitched these games as representing some kind of competition among travelers to visit places. It feels totally artificial. (Why exactly is a railway route unavailable once someone else has traveled it?) I've used neutral language, saying that players "collect" or "take possession" of routes, which they do in the game's backstory by riding the line. But we found it much more comfortable to interpret the game in a robber baron context, with players either building or buying railway lines -- and by the second time we played we were already referring to the claiming of a route as "laying rail." The game plays the same with either interpretation.