Ticket to Ride chugs towards the spooky season with upcoming kids' board game Ghost Train

Everyone’s favourite locomotive tracking board game has announced a kid-friendly version that’s spooky, but not too spooky. Ticket to Ride: Ghost Train will bring a Halloween-themed experience to the UK sometime in September.

Ticket to Ride: Ghost Train lets two to four players suit up in their scariest costume and explore all of the frightful locations across the quaint residential town that comprises the board. Instead of tracks connecting cities in Europe, the UK or the US, this board game uses parade floats to mark the paths between various Halloween-inspired locations - classics such as graveyards and pumpkin patches are joined by deserted schools, foggy lighthouses and the Circus of Dread.

Anyone who has played Ticket to Ride will find the core experience functions much the same. Collect matching sets of cards, play them to travel between locations and fill your bag with victory points…er, candy. Ghost Train is designed to introduce a younger audience to the mechanics that have spawned dozens of variations and themed editions across Ticket to Ride’s slate of boxes, including the upcoming San Fransisco version.

This may not be the most exciting news to you, but then again, the target audience for Ghost Train are not the sort of people to browse enthusiast news sites. With games lasting between 15 and thirty minutes, it fits neatly within a school play period or lunch break without losing the fleeting attention of a group of kids. As for the Halloween theme, publisher Asmodee has apparently worked to dial it in.

“Despite the ghostly theme, we promise there’s nothing too scary about this ghost or the game as a whole and younger children will love it,” said James Arnold, head of marketing at Asmodee.

Now, you might be wondering why this game isn’t branded under the already existing Ticket to Ride: First Journey series, which first released in 2016 and also rates its gameplay for ages six and up. And, well, that’s a good question. There doesn’t seem to be anything beyond the Halloween themeing to differentiate Ghost Town from the experience sold in both the European and US versions of that game. Perhaps Days of Wonder or designer Alan R. Moon didn’t want a second colon in the name.

Ticket to Ride: Ghost Train will cost £29.99 at retail and via online store when it arrives in Europe and the UK from September - just in time for the Spooky Season.