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The Great Tour: European Cities

Updated: Feb 10, 2020

Cards representing the tickets for specified routes; cards to be collected so that you can put down minis along the route to claim the point score for a ticket. This so far sounds rather familiar. Surely it's a summary of Alan Moon's Ticket to Ride? Surprisingly not. This is The Great Tour: European Cities, designed by Kees Meis and Dennis Merkx and published by the Finnish company, Tactic.

In this game, you're not placing out little plastic trains, you're laying out little wooden coaches. To be fair, there are other differences too: the game play is reminiscent of Ticket to Ride but it isn't an exact copy. For starters, the three available tickets specifying the routes are openly displayed, as are those that will subsequently become available.

Like Ticket to Ride, The Great Tour is a light game. It is likely to appeal to families rather than seasoned game players. The open ticket information allows for a degree of forward planning although tickets are more likely to be taken opportunistically rather than as a result of strategic play.


For a low complexity family game, it's a disappointment that the English rules are not as clear as they should be. We did wonder if even the English title was quite correct: shouldn't it be The Grand Tour? The little wooden buses are attractive but the board is basic and functional rather than visually appealing. Sadly, this is a game with less table appeal than Ticket to Ride Europe or the perhaps the more immediately comparable Ticket to Ride: First Journey (Europe) published by Days of Wonder.

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