Ticket to Ride UK Ferries and Tunnels

One of the first updates for my Ticket to Ride UK Board was this Tunnels and Ferries version (based on the Europe edition of the game) sent to me by Rob in May 2007.

Or you can download the map as eight separate A4 (or US Letter) sheets:

• R1C1 - R1C2
• R2C1 - R2C2
• R3C1 - R3C2
• R4C1 - R4C2
  

Rob also made a few other amendments to balance the colours more evenly. He also recommends reducing the number of trains to 37 as there are fewer tracks on the UK map than the US one (definitely a good idea for games with 4 or 5 players).

His last change is to replace the longest track card with the Brunel Trophy as its more appropriate for the UK (details on the board itself).

Thanks Rob - great job :-)

Ticket to Ride UK Map

Back in 2006 I created a UK board for the Ticket to Ride game published by Days of Wonder. I posted the map on the BoardGameGeek website and to date the page has been viewed over twenty thousand times. In the Summer when I redesigned my website the Ticket to Ride page was orphaned, but in an effort to reconnect it I've decided to add the board (and the related extensions) to this blog.

You can find all the related posts by clicking the Ticket to Ride UK tag. Including an improved version of the board created by Ken Meyers.

The UK Board

I know - I should get out more - but Ticket to Ride is such a great game that I couldn't help but have a go at creating a board myself. A map of the United Kingdom is an obvious choice for a British guy, even if Britain is a bit thin and spindly. You will therefore have to excuse the creative license with the train tracks, particularly the ones which in reality would require special trains with portholes and a lot of silicon sealant.

Here is the main board, you can click here for the full size file (approx 2MB):

It may be easier for you to download the map in A4 (Letter) sized sections (each is around 250 Kb).

• Left 1 - Right 1
  
• Left 2 - Right 2
  
• Left 3 - Right 3
  
• Left 4 - Right 4

The map has it's quirks but then there's no point in replicating the feel of the original US map. If you're looking for a further alternative then you might want to take a look at the Les de Jeux de NIM, Belgium version as well (I used their stuff as a guide - so thanks guys!).

Bare in mind that in order to get a suitable number of tracks in (and make them an appropriate length) I've had to make some difficult decisions about which cities to use and also had to shift the cities around a bit. So apologies if the place where you love to live has moved around a bit while you weren't looking.

The UK Cards

You will also need to download and print out the following ticket card sheets (sheet1, sheet2). The cards follow a similar points distribution to the ones in the USA set.

I've included two blank cards if you want to experiment with your own routes.

Tactics and Notes

• Each of the UK capital cities is a hub, this means that more routes run through Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh than any other city. Dublin has the same number of routes (although of course it is the Irish Capital). London is represented by four of its principle stations, collectively they participate in more routes than any other city on the board.
• One of the UK cards is called the Circle Line, it represents a route between all four of the London stations. You only need three of the four routes to achieve the card (because the fourth can be satisfied by the other three in a chain). You get double points for the Circle Line (six) because it is so easy to block.
• There is a bottleneck in Scotland around the Glasgow-Edinburgh point. If you want to get those high value South to North routes then you need to grab a route through here early.
• There are three lanes between the UK's second city, Birmingham, and Paddington. Only one can be used in a 2-player game, two can be used in a 3-player game and all three can be used in a 4 or 5-player game.

FAQ

Over the years I have received a few email comments from people who have tried out the board - thanks to everyone who has commented, either directly or via the BoardGameGeek website. Apologies if I have paraphrased you!

Q: How does the board play with the Europe rules?

Actually I haven't tried it with the European rules. It seems a fairly obvious candidate since so many of the routes represent ferry routes and could use engine ferries on the spaces where the route crossed water. There are also a few candidates for tunnels, particularly in Wales and Scotland.

However, I have a few reservations about how the stations would effect the game. This is a high scoring board (lots of routes) and blocking people can be a major strategy. Stations can prevent this and would probably make for very high scores. There are also a number of long routes (unlike the Europe version) and snatching those can easily connect two disparate parts of the map. I'd be interested to hear of peoples opinions.

Q: How much play testing did you do - did you make any changes as a result?

Lots of playtesting, very few changes. When I made the board I did an analysis of the US version to see how many routes there were, what their distribution was and how connected everything was, and tried to mimic that in the UK map. Given the statistical similarity its interesting that they are so different to play. On reflection the main thing I would now change is not the board but the cards; I think that there are probably too many north-south routes and not enough east-west ones.

Q: Isn't Britain a little less stubby in real life?

Erm... yes it is a bit. The UK really is rather long and narrow and to make best use of the board space I squashed the map slightly (the country is about 20% shorter than it should be).

Q: Have you though about doing an African or Asian map?

Both Africa and Asia would make splendid boards, and might actually teach me a little non-western geography which must be a good thing, but I think its better left to people who actually know those continents well. Johannesburg to Cairo anyone?

Q: I am looking to ask an online digital photo shop if they can print out the jpeg for me, but was wondering what size I need them to do it?

It is designed to be printed out on 4x2 A4 pages - which is the equivalent to an A1 sheet (A1: 841mm x 594mm, 33.11 inches x 23.39 inches) - Im guessing that a 30x20 inch print should be okay.

Q: I am thinking about doing my own map - how did you create yours, and can I have a copy of the files?

I used a copy of Adobe Photoshop to create the main file, with many, many, many layers. The background is a faded out physical map of the UK which has been edge highlighted to define the coastline, this is surrounded by a scanned track which I took from the Belgium extension. The cities and (horror) tracks are placed by hand by defining and rotating buttons to make each track piece. The cards are scanned from the boxed game and then altered with a much smaller version of the map, which has been washed with grey and then speckled to get a suitably grainy effect. Im afraid that the original files are locked away on an old PC at the moment, but I'll try and make some of the different layers available as a resource to other people as soon as I can.

Q: Any ideas about how this might be used with the Marklin edition?

I've never played the Marklin edition so I haven't really got any firm ideas. If anyone has any thoughts then I'd be happy to add them here.

Smallprint

This is an unofficial extension - you need the full version of Ticket To Ride to play this, and it's well worth the cash! This material is my own and is no way associated with Days of Wonder (although their Art Director dropped me a message at one point to say that he liked it - so I think they are pretty supportive of community extensions! :-)

Crack Defense

I'm a sucker for a good Tower Defense game (with or without FMV), and this week I've been playing Tap Defense on the iPhone, a great free example of the genre.


Tap Defense is a simple (but very addictive) game, based on three maps and six tower types, all of which work pretty nicely together. What makes it so good though is that fact that you earn interest on any gold that you save (rather than emptying the pot by buying or upgrading towers). This means that unlike other Tower Defense games the optimum strategy is not to build the most powerful defense, but to build the minimum defense that will work on any given level.

This makes for a very satisfying balancing act, as you try to find just the right combination of towers to kill the enemy for the minimum cost. Those saved pennies are needed later on for the harder levels (30-43), and if you get it wrong then you'll be overrun, triggering another cycle of battery sapping play.

Cracking :-)

Something Open This Way Comes

At Southampton we have a history of Open Access Research, and a number of my colleagues (in particular Les Carr and Stevan Harnad) are heavily involved with the Open Access movement. At its heart Open Access Research holds the principle that publicly funded research should be available for free. It challenges the existing publishing model, where researchers sign away the rights to their work to publishers of journals and professional proceedings, in exchange for the knowledge that those publishers will act as gatekeepers for quality, and disseminate their findings to other universities and libraries around the world.

The contention of the Open Access movement is that the copyright restrictions placed on academic authors by publishers is a price that is no longer worth paying, and that Universities will get far higher levels of dissemination by simply making their publications available through web-based institutional repositories such as e-prints. Peer review is still a mechanism that works in this world, but the role of professional bodies and publishers changes dramatically.

I recently attended the AACE e-learn 2008 conference in Las Vegas, where for the first time I became aware of the momentum building behind the other side of this movement: Open Access Education. Applied to education Open Access is about the principle that Universities and Schools should share their teaching materials for the common good.

Richard Baraniuk's opening keynote set the tone. Richard is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University and he spoke at length about the need for Open Access Education, in order to deal with a very real problem (especially in the USA) where text-books have become prohibitively expensive to buy for many poorer students and smaller colleges. In 1999 Richard founded Connexions, an Open Access website where teachers and lecturers can author and share learning content, or assemble existing content into book-shaped packages for their students.

Connexions is especially interesting to me, both because of my interest in Web Literacy, but also because we have a number of our own research projects looking at Teaching and Learning (TL) repositories (Faroes) and Institutional repositories (EdShare).

How do you Solve a Problem Like Copyright?

Faroes is focused on TL repositories for Language Teachers, and has produced a repository called the Language Box that allows teachers to upload and share their resources. The Language Box was a bit of a reaction to the previous crop of TL repositories - many of them based around complex Learning Objects, with larger metadata schemas and sophisticated content packaging - and re-imagines TL repositories in a Web 2.0 world. Many TL repositories have failed, and so our approach was not to scatter Web 2.0 glitter over the same old problems, but to go the core of what the repository is supposed to do.


In Faroes we learnt from the big Web 2.0 sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr, and have re-imagined TL repositories as an online service for Hosting and Managing (rather than Archiving) digital resources. The Language Box is still in beta, but we're getting good feedback from our early users based around this approach. However Open Access is still an issue, and in our workshops many teachers are still concerned about copyright.

The Language Box

Julie Willems, from Monash University in Australia, presented a paper at e-learn that neatly summarized the problem. Julie talked about effectiveness of multi-model learning, and how images and video can be used alongside traditional texts to support different learning styles, but how copyright laws that allow fair use of materials for teaching in a classroom setting cripple our ability to use those materials online - or to share them via web-based communities.

Both Connexions and the Language Box are attempting to solve the problem by creating an online collection that is, in its entirety, licensed under one of the Creative Commons licenses. The issue is that many existing resources use copyrighted materials (often quite unintentionally, through the assumption that everything online is without copyright), and perhaps more seriously, that teachers are worried that their Universities may in fact have some intellectual property stake in materials that they create in the course of their job.

The Democratization of Education?

The Internet and the World Wide Web are often compared to the printing press in terms of their impact on society. Gutenberg's mechanical printing press invented in the 15th century was revolutionary not because it allowed the mass production of text (woodblock printing in China also enabled this centuries earlier), but because it was so cheap to assemble new texts for printing. This simple fact meant that not only did printed text become cheaper, but that more texts could be printed. In a way it was the start of The Long Tail.

Gutenberg and the Mechanical Printing Press

Through the printing press the age of mass publishing was born, a method that was later adopted by radio and TV and reinterpreted as mass broadcasting. The consequence of the printing press was much more than the availability of cheap texts, it was the democratization of reading, and the establishment of institutions (newspapers, publishers, universities, scientific societies) whose job it was to write, edit and produce materials that spread knowledge (both noble and scandalous) throughout the population.

But now the age of mass publishing is passing.

The Internet and the Web are so recent, so close to us, that the immediate effects are the ones that dominate our thinking: the creation of amazing collaborative works such as Wikipedia, the phenomenon of Blogging, and the emergence of online communities and social networks that have reduced distances, increased awareness, and made the world a smaller place.

But these effects should be understood as analogous to newspapers and books, in that they are historically important not because of what they are, but because of what they change. The consequences of the Internet and the Web will be much more than these tools and early applications, it will be the democratization of writing, and the impact this will have on the institutions and professions that are currently shaped by mass publishing.

And this is why Open Access Education is so important - because if Universities ignore the reality of what is happening to information and knowledge on the Web then they risk being sidelined in the short term, and potentially having their business models undermined in the longer term. The NSF in the USA and the JISC in the UK seem to have realised this and much greater time is being spent looking at Open Access and investing in the tools and mechanisms to make it happen. The challenge is to make the institutions and academics themselves realise that they may need to change their practices in order to ride the wave, rather than drowning beneath it.

It is possible to be a curator of knowledge and learning without being its gaoler.

Congratulations America

Americans like to style their president as the Leader of the Free World, and in many ways this is not a bad description. America is the most powerful of the democratic nations that respects freedom of religious, political and intellectual expression. The free world is an informal billion-person family of nations, and as a fully paid up citizen in one of the oldest countries in that family, I believe that we have a responsibility to lead by example, protect those values, and ultimately expand our freedoms to others who wish to experience them.

Map of the Free World (Freedom House)

But the last eight years have been hard. At an important time when Russia has been reinventing itself, and China has ascended, we have seen America retreat into isolationism and a mindset of distrust, leaving the Free World rudderless and adrift. Like a lot of people in Europe I initially had a bit of a chuckle at the antics of George W. Bush, but his presidency has been so damaging that I have long stopped smiling.

This morning the American people elected Barack Obama to replace Bush in January. It's a momentus day for Americans for many reasons, not least of which is that he will be their first black president. But it's also an important day for those of us outside of America, but who share our values with Americans.

Barack Obama is a multilateralist, who believes in the family of free nations. He represents the next generation of politicians who understand America's place in the world, and understand the true nature of her importance. Of course he is just one man, and there are a lot of challenges inside and outside of America that he will have to tackle. I'm sure that not everything will go well. But I share the general sense that a corner has been turned, and that for the immediate future at least, the Free World once more has its Leader.

Does m-learning exist?

I've been involved in mobile and pervasive learning research for around six years, but this year was the first time that I've attended two of the leading events in the field: IADIS m-learning (held back in April), and m-learn (which I attended last week).


I enjoyed both events - not least because of the interesting locations (especially the Cold War museum in Shropshire with its ominous collection of the best nuclear weapons 20th century money could buy) - however this year there has been a dramatic improvement in mobile technology (driven in no small part by the iPhone and Android) that has left me wondering if there is such a thing as m-learning anymore.

In fact some of the most enjoyable presentations at m-learn reinforced this thought. For example, Thomas Cochrane from the UniTec, New Zealand presented a fabulous experiment with multimedia reflective journals, students on a design course were given video phones and told to use them to add content to a variety of Web 2.0 style sites, and bring together them together in a Vox powered online blog.

The interesting thing is that most of the innovation in this case is in the use of multimedia and the online sharing, the mobile phones are almost incidental - a convenient way of creating content - their mobility is useful because you can film outside of the classroom and upload from anywhere (for example, design students road-testing their products in the wild) but its not enabling a new kind of activity (such as merging virtual with physical spaces, location-based services, or synchronously connecting students outside of the classroom). And even if it was, isn't that just what we do with desktop or laptop systems, only on a mobile device?

That may seem like an odd argument - after all, if it's on a mobile device doesn't that make it m-learning?

However, I think that as devices increase in power the fact that learning involves a mobile device becomes less and less interesting. If I upload a photo to flickr from my laptop is that m-learning? What about if I use my iphone? What about if all I was doing was accessing Blackboard through Mobile Safari?

It seems to me that the term m-learning will become less and less relevant - even if (perhaps especially if) we start to see it used more and more.

Because if all our e-learning is m-learning, why do we need the term at all?

Death Magnetic: How can I be lost, if I've got nowhere else to go?

Last week I got myself a copy of the latest Metallica album (Death Magnetic). I've been following Metallica since the Autumn of 1991. That was a good year for rock; Nirvana's Nevermind, G'n'R's Use Your Illusions (I and II), and Metallica's Black Album stabbed a flag in the eye of 80's rock, and defined the genre for my generation (and launched Grunge and Thrash into the mainstream as well).

The Black Album is astonishingly good, but Metallica never really recovered from their success and it has remained a high point in their career. Of their albums since then, only S&M really merits a re-listen, and that's basically a greatest hits album (with generous doses of orchestral accompaniment).

Death Magnetic claims to recapture some of the magic of those glory days. The band has supposedly put their arguments behind them, and this is supposed to be a new start. This is supposed to be vintage Metallica.

So is it?

Well let's get something straight, Death Magnetic is no Black Album. When I first heard it I was a little disappointed, sure its not some good stuff on it, but nothing that matches the riff on Enter Sandman, nothing that gets under your skin like Nothing Else Matters, and nothing that has the anthemic qualities of Unforgiven. But as I have listened to it more and more, I've realised that actually this is still a really good album.

Its no Black Album - but then why should it be? This is a different band, a different time, and this is a different piece of work.

The band are obviously enjoying themselves, if you were being negative you might say that some of the songs go off the rails slightly and turn into a bit of a jam, but then you could just as easily say they are more complex - the album more textured - and that underneath the layers the quality might, just might, have returned.

Nirvana disbanded after Kurt Cobain's suicide in 1994, G'n'R were riddled with internal arguments and finally disintegrated in 1997, but Metallica carried on. There work may not have been as fine as it once once, but they carried on touring and making music, and I think that it has finally paid off.

Death Magnetic is its own album - and it's a return to a new form.



Metallica are possibly the finest metal band there has ever been. And now looking back at the Load's and Reload's I feel slightly St. Guilty :-/ After all, this is the band that produced the Black Album: so how could they be lost, when they had nowhere else to go?