Ticket to Ride: Classic Edition

The description of this achievement should be clear enough. You want to score more points than your opponent while connecting the city of Berlin to all 5 neighbouring countries (as also described in the achievement guide by fellow TA-user ‘A1337Haxor’), being:

- Danemark (Denmark, located on the northern side of the map)
- Niederlande (the Netherlands, located on the western side of the map)
- Frankreich (France, located on the south-western side of the map)
- Schweiz (Schwitzerland, located on the south side of the map)
- Österreich (Austria, located on the south-eastern side of the map)

If you place your trains on the tracks connecting to the flags of the corresponding countries you will successfully have created a connection needed to meet the requirements for this achievement.

As you will need to lay down quite a few trains to connect all 5 countries to Berlin, you might end up short on trains before you have placed all the trains you need. It took me a few tries, but by using these connections I managed to meet the requirements and even having 5 spare trains:



When I started my achievement-winning game, I picked C. Huntingbot as my one and only opponent. He is usually going for the smaller pieces of railway, so after claiming the tracks I really needed for my route (that any given opponent also frequently seems to need as well) there were not many trouble ahead. These tracks were:

- Frankfurt to Mannheim
- Mannheim to Karlsruhe

Depending on the routes your opponent(s) start the game with, you want to take care that you can still place your trains on the connecting tracks between the country of Frankreich and Österreich (on the southern part of the map). If you are blocked by your opponent(s) anyway, remember you have margin of 5 trains when following the route I posted.

When deciding which tickets you pick to begin the game with you will be given the option to choose between long and small destination tickets. In my achievement-winning game I picked 3 large and 1 small destination ticket, but I ended up playing with just 2 large ones. This is why this game also ended up awarding me with the ‘Mega Commuter’-achievement for only using long destination tickets. These long destination tickets also seem to be connecting one of the countries quite often, so you won’t have to differ too much from your planned route. If you are feeling lucky, feel free to start the game choosing between 4 long destination tickets.

The destination tickets I played this game with were:

- Danemark to Österrreich
- Danemark to Lindau

As my opponent C. Huntington did not give much resistance to me building my railway network, it was quite an easy victory. My yellow railway network ended up scoring 119 points while finishing 2 out of 2 destination tickets, while my opponent managed to score 104 points and finishing 2 out of 2 (short) destination tickets.

* if for some reason the image is not present in this solution, just let me know, I can re-upload it! :)

The five surrounding countries are represented by 14 cities that have flags instead of full names.

The countries are:
Denmark (Danemark, top center of map, off-set thin white cross on red)
Holland (Neiderlands, left side of map on top, Red-Blue-White horizontal striped flag)
France (Frankreich, left side of map on bottom, Blue-White-Red vertical striped flag)
Switzerland (Schweiz, bottom of map on left, thick white cross centered on red flag)
Austria (Österreich, bottom of map, two circles on the right, single thick white stripe on red flag)

The best strategy is to connect the 3 countries at the bottom of the map along the Yellow-Black-Yellow-Pink route and head up counter clockwise around the map until you reach France and Denmark. Focus on collecting cards for those long routes to Berlin, and take it as soon as you have the cards.