Western Canadian Map for Ticket to Ride

Always wanted to be a Railroad Baron? Enjoy the thrill of a competition? But maybe just not ready to commit to a real investment? Then you are a prime candidate to play the board game ‘Ticket to Ride’. But if you’ve overplayed it and it’s going stale, then maybe it is a time for a new map and destinations. We wanted a map of Western Canada, centred around BC and Alberta, with just a bit of Washington, Idaho, Montana, Saskatchewan, Northwest Territories, Yukon, and Alaska around the edges as needed. So this is how we made that.

And, at the end of this, we have a downloadable PDF version that you can print (or have printed) and play yourself. As long as you have a base game version with at least 45 train pieces and the draw cards to use with this map and the tickets, here is a brand new adventure for you. Visit Banff, take a ferry to Vancouver Island, or see what Uranium City is all about.

Our family enjoys the interaction and competition of board games. We dabbled in Catan, then for the longest time we played Wingspan almost daily. But recently our son Nate was introduced to “Ticket to Ride” while vacationing with his cousins. It is a game where you are racing to complete train routes before you get cut off by others. Since the cousins own the original game and we could play that with them, we decided we should buy a copy of “Ticket to Ride – Rails and Sails”. This is the same game, but that adds ships and water crossings to the game.

While we were in our local games store, Bastion Games, Nate was fascinated by the other map expansions that were available. He wanted to get more and play them, but that’s a ton of money. But the idea of alternate maps was firmly planted, and he kept bringing it up. He wanted new maps to try. So while on vacation, he and I decided to make one of our own. It would encompass Western Canada, centred on the province of British Columbia (where we live) and Alberta. And with surrounding provinces and states also shown to just past the border. He really wanted to play this as a map, and I thought it would be a great project for us to build together, and a great way learn geography of our area.

Once we had decided to do a real-world map, we needed to decide on dimensions, number of cities, etc. Here are the decisions made, and the rationales.

Destination cities: We wanted the size to be a bit larger than the original (36 cities) and the “Rails and Sails - Great Lakes” (41 cities). So we went with 50 as our target. We ended up with 51

Board Size: Each train is 1 x 3/8 inches. So the map would need to be fairly large if we were to have all our trains and destinations. Since the area we wanted to cover was rectangular, we went with 24 x 36 Inch constraints. Sheets this size are classified as an “Architectural D” sheet and are easy to get printed. (You can take the map and get it printed at Staples as a “Color Blueprint” for very cheap as a result.)

Number of Tickets: We decided to target the mid 40’s, as that seemed on par with the other games. We ended up with 48.

We started by looking for a good roadmap of the area we needed. We found one (labelled as free for use) on an atlas site. https://pacific-map.com/maps-of-british-columbia.html

All the following work was done in Microsoft Visio. Other programs will no doubt be better, but this is what I am familiar with and had available.

We downloaded and saved the Jpeg, and then imported it, and snipped and trimmed from it until we had the general area sized to where we needed it. Using that, we then traced the landmass outlines. These were filled with a semi-transparent green.

We then brought the roadmap to the front where we could read it. We selected cities to set as destinations based on spacing. As a result, some larger cities were left off (like Calgary, Alberta) and other small towns (like Atlin, BC) were added. Once we had all the cities on the map, we deleted the overlaid roadmap.

Last of all, we set the train and ferry routes. We started by drawing lines between cities to decide what and how to make connections. Then we laid in the boat and train spots. Initially we made all routes as uncolored blanks. Then we counted them and tallied in Excel. With that data organized, we then distributed the colors and wild routes so they would be even, and no cities would have the same colors entering in more than one place. We did also sometimes slightly shift cities as needed to make the train routes fit in between.

The value and distribution of the tickets was based on what we had seen in other Ticket to Ride games. Once again, we tallied data from our existing game in Excel, and then graphed it. The distribution of high to low was a lobsided bell curve, and mostly centred around the 9 to 10 point and encompassing more of the 5-6 range.

We had previously decided to make 48 tickets, so we put that over the curve and decided how many of each point value we would make. Then we referenced that against our list of cities, and found routes between cities that matched that critical length. We also tracked the number of routes utilizing cities, to ensure that we never ended with impossible situations (ie. 4 tickets terminating in a city but only 3 trains entering it.). The goal was as even of a distribution as possible.

We now needed to test this. We looked up and found the closest Staples as we were on vacation and didn’t know the local shops. We ordered it as a “Colour Blueprint” since it was sized for those sheets.

For the ticket cards, we bought a dollarstore poker set. We hand wrote out each ticket onto them. These were just temporary, but this allowed us to shuffle and deal them.

This was the fun part. We took parts from the official game like the play pieces (Trains and ships) and train/ship draw cards. We then shuffled our playing card tickets and dealt out. The games were played using all the rules from the regular game, but on our personal map.

It was fun, being the first to claim routes and cites and play the map. We played multiple times with anywhere from 2 to 4 players. As we did, we found choke points, and frustrations. Then we would markup the map and make changes on the fly to sort them. Games and routes were discussed, and cities and tickets were added and discarded until we felt it played in a balanced manner.

Now that the playtesting was done, we decided to make the finalized version.

We started by looking for a good quality terrain image of north America. We found one (free for use) on the “Nasa – Earth Observatory” site. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148087/satellite-mappers-have-north-america-covered

Once again, we downloaded the large, high definition Jpeg, and then snipped and trimmed from it until we had the general area sized to where we needed it.

We took the cropped picture into our original trial map. We used our previously traced the landmass outlines filled with a semi-transparent green as an overlay, so that it wouldn’t be too busy. We used the trimmed picture as a background behind that, and blurred it slightly so it wouldn’t break up the train and ship outlines.

We also did some nicer gradient fills on the train and ship outlines. ‘Wild’ spaces were filled with blue and orange.

A points tracker was added, as well as some setup instructions and scoring guide.

The Route cards were the last thing to make. The tested routes that worked were copied over and made pretty. Each card had the city names and the points value. Like the actual game, we also included a mini-map of the board that showed the route terminations to help find them on the map.

We sent out a bunch of emails to local printers asking about capabilities and cost. Once that was sorted, we sent the final PDF version to them.

The board was printed onto adhesive-backed Vinyl that was then attached to foam core for rigidity and laminated.

The cards were printed onto 110lb (300 gsm) stock and then sheared. We used a photo trimmer to round each corner. You can leave them square, or use scissors to cut out the corners by hand to round them. We left a rounded line on each card for that purpose.

It turned out amazing, and we are so happy with it. Total print cost was $45 Canadian, so a lot cheaper than a new game.

Now that you’ve seen our process in getting this together, you can download your own copy and have it printed. Here are the attached files.

· Board Full – This is a full size PDF of the board ready to be printed on ‘Architectural D (24x36”)’ sheets.

· Board Split – This is the full sized board split down to be printed over multiple standard letter sheets (8.5x11”). You’ll need to cut and tape these together if you do.

· Route Cards – These are all the route cards printed over multiple standard letter sheets (8.5x11”). These are poker sized, so you can print them on adhesive-backed sheets, cut them out, and stick them to an old set of playing cards. Photo paper is best as it will then glide and shuffle better. Otherwise, you could get them printed from the same place as your map. Ask for heavy photo paper, or 100lb or higher rated paper.

This is all made from unrestricted resources, and we are also sharing it freely. If you do distribute it online, please link it back here.