Awesome Music: In sharp contrast to the laid-back soundtracks of the other games, the electronic version of Legendary Asia has a percussion-heavy soundtrack befitting a Himalayan adventure.
Fan Nickname: The Switzerland edition is sometimes known as, "Ticket to Ride: Escape from Switzerland," due to the large number of routes leading out of the country.
Game-Breaker: Some feel this way about new rules introduced in the various expansions, while others feel this way about the original USA game. Some examples:
Drawing two coast-to-coast tickets with the endpoints of both conveniently near each other at the start of the USA game can give a player an unfair advantage. As an example, if you can complete Seattle-New York, you only need two more segments to complete Montreal-Vancouver, which will net you over 40 points.
The 1910 expansion introduces a fair amount of redundancy in tickets, with several pairs of tickets that have the same starting point and endpoints only one segment away from each other. This means that a savvy player who knows the deck well enough can be almost guaranteed to draw tickets that he/she has already completed, essentially earning free points late in the game.
Europe introduces train stations, which make it much more difficult to shut a player out of a certain city. However, forcing a player to use a train station does reduce their bonus points at the end of the game, as well as jeopardizing their longest route bonus.
Gateway Series: The game has been praised by critics for being a well-made entry point for those looking to enter serious tabletop gaming.
Sequel Difficulty Spike: Most of the expansions are designed to make the game a lot trickier than the basic USA/Europe maps. Some examples:
Nearly half of Switzerland is made up of tunnel routes.
Africa groups the colors into types of "terrain", making it much harder to come up with contingency plans, since you will often need the same one or two colors to approach a city from any direction (unlike most maps, where the color scheme appears to be random). Double-tracked routes are pretty much nonexistent except at the edges of the board. The instruction manual flat-out warns you that a 5-player game will be total mayhem.
India may require the most careful planning of them all, due to the "mandala" bonus it awards for completing tickets two different ways. The usual strategy goes like this: 1) Mentally draw a circle on the board that contains all of your ticket destinations. 2) Pray that none of the routes along that circle get blocked. One missing link can rob you of a 30 or 40-point bonus at the end of the game.
Nederland appears to subvert this at first, by opening up both sides of the double routes in a 2 or 3-player game, but requiring the second player to use such a route to pay tokens to the first player. Everything you build requires you to pay tokens to the bank, or to other players. And there's a huge bonus (easily worth more than any single ticket in the deck) for whoever has the most tokens left at the end of the game. Oh, and did we mention that there's a dummy player competing for space in the 2-player game?
Many game critics have been vocal in their disapproval of the tunnels due to their Luck-Based Mission nature: Until you try to claim a tunnel segment, you don't know how many cards it will cost you. If it's a 3-train tunnel and you only have three cards of the designated color, you could get it on the first try, or waste several turns trying to complete the tunnel. Collecting one more card than necessary seems like the best way to mitigate this risk, but it's still a crapshoot.
The passenger tokens in Marklin are derided not so much for their effect on the gameplay, but for the annoyance of having to set them up each time, and the fear of losing even one small piece (unlike the trains, there are no replacement tokens).
That One Level: Every board seems to have at least one city that's inconveniently located, such that it's out of the way of most other routes. Drawing a ticket that leads to such a city late in the game can be your downfall.
In USA, it's Miami. Getting there requires 4, 5, or 6 cards of a matching color, depending on whether you route your trains through Charleston, Atlanta, or New Orleans.
Las Vegas has only two ways into the city, both by 2-3 card single routes, but thankfully there aren't any destinations that lead there. Then came USA 1910, which added two.
Europe has Edinburgh, which is only connected to one other city, London.
Geneva, and just about anything near the Italian border, can be a royal pain to get to in Switzerland.
Legendary Asia has Khabarovsk, in the northeastern corner of the board. You either need five matching red or black cards to get there from other mainland cities, or you have to take at least two ferries to get there via Seoul and Vladivostok. The ferries also make getting to the island nations (Japan, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, and for all practical purposes, South Korea) a bit of a pain.
Team Asia has Kathmandu, which is close to the middle of the board but only accessible via deceptively short tunnels that could cost you up to six extra train cards.
Africa has Addis Ababa and the three countries off the map at the northern end of the board, which can be difficult to reach from the more populated southern areas. Tchad in particular is at least two segments away from any named city. And Madagascar is (naturally) only reachable by ferry.
Pretty much everything north of the Arctic Circle in Nordic Countries. The shorter segments leading up along the Norwegian coast are all tunnels and ferries, the 5-train route from Roveaneimi to Kirkenes does not allow the use of locomotives, and the only other option is a 9-train route through Murmansk, which allows card substitution to pull it off, but it the longest route to be seen on any Ticket to Ride map thus far.
