The WBC 2025 Ticket to Ride online tournament ran from November 11, 2024, to April 9, 2025. The games were played on BoardGameArena.com with the USA Mega option. There were 59 participants in the tournament and a total of 86 games were played. All games played were four player games.
First Round
Each player played 4 simultaneous games in the first round. Four players Haakon Monsen, Cliff Ackman, Rod Davidson, and Curt Collins II won 3 games to advance. 15 players won 2 matches and they all advanced. There was only one player that advanced with 1 win.
Semifinal
Twenty players competed in the semifinal round. Again, each player played 4 simultaneous games. Andrew Emerick and Yoni Weiss won 3 games to advance: Chris Trimmer, Max DuBoff, Aaron Byrd, and Andy Latto advanced by winning 2 games. Dan Elkins was the lone player to advance with only 1 win.
Final
The final round was close. Only one player, Andrew Emerick, managed to win 2 games and thus became the champion. The final standings are as follows:
- Andrew Emerick
- Chris Trimmer
- Max DuBoff
- Aaron Byrd
- Yoni Weiss
- Dan Elkins
Stats
The following are some stats based on the 27 games played in the Semifinal and Final (I did not have the time to do the data entry for the round 1 and I didn’t want the analysis skewed due to possible newbie mistakes).
| Average | High | Low |
| Winning Score | 157.1 | 233 | 120 |
| Turns/Player | 35.4 | 42 | 31 |
| Longest Route | 38 | 45 | 29 |
| Most Tickets | 7.4 | 12 | 4 |
| Winner’s Route Points | 69.8 | 89 | 47 |
| Winner’s Ticket Points | 73.4 | 142 | 36 |
| Winner’s Route Bonus | 5.6 | | |
| Winner’s Globetrotter Bonus | 8.3 | | |
| Winner’s Turns Taking Tickets | 1.9 | 7 | 0 |
| Winner’s Total Tickets | 6.4 | 12 | 3 |
With the average winning score being 157.1 and the average number of turns to be 35.4. It reasons that the average points scored by the winner per turn is 4.4 (from this analysis, it follows that a reasonable handicap of the starting positions is to give the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th positions a handicap of 1, 2, and 3 points).
How did player order fare in this tournament? The following shows the number of times won from each position:
- First – 9
- Second – 3
- Third – 8
- Fourth – 7
The results seem reasonable with the anomaly of the 2nd position only winning 3 times.
How important are the longest path bonus and the Globe Trotter (most tickets) bonus? The following shows how many times a winning player has won them:
- Neither – 3
- Longest Route – 9
- Most Tickets – 9
- Both – 6
Winning Strategy
In the base Ticket to Ride (USA map), the dominant strategy is to take long routes and rush the end of the game. The Mega game is supposed to even out the chances for the ticket strategy. Let’s see how well the rush strategy fared. I defined a win for the rush strategy if a player takes tickets at most one time and the game finishes under 35 turns. Given this definition 9 games out of 27 were won by the rush strategy. This suggests that the rush strategy is still viable, but certainly not dominant.
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