Ticket to Ride heads to San Francisco in its next city spin-off, out this summer

The next Ticket to Ride board game will see the venerable train game take a trip across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco.

Ticket to Ride: San Francisco is the latest entry in the long-running series to focus on a specific city in a smaller, faster spin-off, following New York, London and Amsterdam. Like those games, San Francisco will offer a simplified, 15-minute version of Ticket to Ride’s gameplay in a more compact box and board, with players forming routes between locations to score points.

Replacing Ticket to Ride’s train carriages (which became taxis in New York, and buses in London) are cable cars, with players placing them along lines of the city’s transportation system. As well as scoring points by claiming routes between points on the board, players will need to collect souvenirs - in the form of tourist tokens - for the best score.

Among the locations on the board are Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Painted Ladies - the city's iconic row of vivid houses by Alamo Square - with the game’s colourful visuals and box art drawing on the “peace and love” era of the 1960s. Ticket to Ride: London similarly took inspiration from the decade, while New York featured pop-culture aspects from the 1970s.

Like the rest of Ticket to Ride's city spin-offs, San Francisco is a standalone game rather than an expansion, so there's no need to own any of the previous entries in the series.

Ticket to Ride: San Francisco will cost $24.99 when it releases this summer. Publisher Days of Wonder announced that the upcoming board game will be available exclusively in US chain Target next month, with a wider worldwide and North American release following in August.