Ticket to Ride board game, computer game

I’ve long enjoyed board games, such as Settler of Catan and Puerto Rico. On my trip to Oregon this past November, Torsten introduced me to two new games, Ticket to Ride and Transamerica, both of which are train games. They’re both quite fun, though currently I’m somewhat more enthusiastic about Ticket to Ride.

Unfortunately, I rarely am able to get local friends to play games, due to scheduling and such. I was pleased to learn that Days of Wonder offers an online Ticket to Ride game.

When you buy a Days of Wonder game, it comes with a code that you can use to get a six month subscription to their online games. This works for all their games, not just the one you purchased. If you buy more games, you can add each code to your account to extend it by six months. Or you can buy additional subscription time directly.

But what’s really clever is that they allow people to play the games without having to buy a board game or pay any money. You can register as a guest, and then you can join in games that other players start. Guests can’t start new games, or participate in rankings.

The Ticket to Ride online game is quite well done. When a player starts a game, he or she specifies the maximum number of players, which board to use (USA or Europe), etc. If you want to play with only specific players, you can specifiy a password required to join that game.
The graphics and gameplay are good. There are only a few things I find annoying.

If a player pauses too long, the game drops them and substitutes a robot. While that’s good for pick-up games, there should be an option to make the timeout longer or disable it completely for private games.

The map display is a fixed size. You can resize the window, but you don’t get a bigger map. There is an option to zoom in on a portion of the map, but I’ve got a lot of screen space that’s just going to waste, so I’d really like to see the full map at the zoom resolution.

More recently, they’ve introduced a computer game (DVD-ROM). This allows offline play, or will work through the online service. I’ve ordered one but haven’t yet received it. I gather that it does allow for full use of large displays. It requires OpenGL, so they’re probably drawing 3D pieces, etc.

Of course, they only support Windows. No Linux version. (The online version is a Java applet, so it works on Linux.)
I reluctantly installed the ATI proprietary Linux drivers, which seem to work OK, though I’m disappointed that they don’t support rotation (part of the X RandR extension) since my LCD monitor can pivot into a portrait orientation. Still, they do what I need, and the OpenGL performance is adequate. (I have an older ATI card that was under $100, not one of the state-of-the-art $500 overclocked gamer cards.)

But thus far I can’t seem to get OpenGL applications running on Windows in VMware to work, so I expect that I won’t be able to use the Ticket to Ride game that way. However, a Google search turned up a page at BoardGameGeek reviewing a magazine article about casual online gaming and Ticket to Ride. One of the comments posted to the page says that the computer game is basically an enhanced version of the applet, and thus still in Java and portable to other platforms, though a Linux installer is not included. So I’m hoping that I’ll be able to run it without needed Windows at all.