Family · 2020

Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam

Ticket to Ride in miniature: fifteen minutes of routes, contracts and merchandise in 17th-century Amsterdam.

2–4 players
15–30 min
1.5 / 5 · Light

Set up the game

0 of 5 steps

Tick each step as you complete it.

1Put the board in the middle and give each player their set of 16 plastic carts plus the matching scoring marker, placed on the start space.
Table setup
Marker
2Shuffle the transportation cards, deal two to each player and leave the deck beside the board. Then flip five cards face up: if three of them are wilds, discard all five and flip five new ones.
Card combinations
3Shuffle the contract cards and deal two to each player. Everyone looks at them and discards at least one, returning it to the bottom of the deck. Kept contracts stay secret until the end.
Cards
4Make the 16-card merchandise bonus deck next to the board. Those cards are won by claiming routes with the cart symbol and stay face up in front of their owner, visible to everyone.
Cards
5The youngest player starts and play continues clockwise. Remember the route scoring table on the board: 1 space is 1 point, 2 are 2, 3 are 4, 4 are 7, 5 are 10 and 6 are 15.
Claiming a route

What it is about

Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam is Ticket to Ride at its smallest: the same loop as always —draw cards, claim routes, fulfil tickets— on a compact board that plays in a quarter of an hour. Everything the big game carries (long routes, several train types, lots of money) is gone, and the game gets tenser because every cart counts.

Contracts drive it. Claiming routes scores points, but the tickets linking two locations decide the game, both when they are completed and when they are left in the drawer. Merchandise cards are the third front: cheap to collect and worth a final bonus that often separates first from second.

The game is short and the ending is visible: as soon as someone is down to two carts, everyone gets one last turn. Whoever read the board and has their contracts lined up gets paid; whoever left projects half-done pays for them.

BGG page Official rulebook

Source note

The small-box Ticket to Ride: same familiar loop with contracts and merchandise cards on an Amsterdam map for 2 to 4 players. The rulebook includes no expansions.

EN rulebook (Days of Wonder, 2020) · Reviewed: 24 Oct 2026