Section 2: Components
A complete standard game requires the following equipment. Artwork and component colors may vary between printings, but every component must serve the same gameplay function.
- Game board: A map of North America showing cities, routes, route colors, route lengths, and a scoring track around the edge.
- Playing pieces: Forty-five plastic train cars for each player color are used to occupy claimed routes. Each player also has one spare train that may be kept aside as a replacement.
- Markers: One scoring marker in each player color tracks that player’s score around the board.
- Train Car card deck: Colored Train Car cards represent railway cars. The regular colors are purple, blue, orange, white, green, yellow, black, and red.
- Locomotive cards: Multicolored Locomotives belong to the Train Car deck and act as wild cards when claiming routes.
- Destination Ticket card deck: Each ticket names two cities and displays a point value based on the difficulty of connecting them.
- Longest continuous path card: This reminder card identifies the 10-point endgame bonus.
Understanding the Board
A route is a line of colored or gray spaces directly connecting two neighboring cities. The number of spaces is the route’s length and determines both how many train cars are required to claim it and how many points it scores.
Some city pairs are joined by double routes: two parallel routes of equal length. Each parallel line is a separate route. A player may never claim both routes in the same double-route pair.
Card Functions
Regular Train Car cards are collected into same-color sets. A Locomotive can substitute for a Train Car card of any color. Destination Tickets do not pay for routes; instead, they create secret objectives that are evaluated after the final turn.