Ticket to Ride is being turned into a reality TV show

Train board game Ticket to Ride is chugging its way onto the small screen with an upcoming reality television series.

Alan R. Moon’s 2004 Spiel des Jahres winner is the inspiration for a new ‘travel competition’ show, in which five teams compete to complete challenges and travel the most distance – by air and sea as well as land, presumably by rail. The series is described as being a winner-takes-all contest, although the grand prize is yet to be announced. (The press release describes Ticket to Ride as an “adventure board game” – we’d guess because a TV series about “route-building” doesn’t sound quite so exciting.)

It’s the first small-screen project to emerge from Asmodee Entertainment, the division of the board game publishing powerhouse set up last spring to develop film, TV shows, comics and graphic novels based on games from studios including Days of Wonder, Catan Studio, Space Cowboys, Fantasy Flight Games and more. A movie adaptation of Catan has been in the works since at least 2015.

Asmodee Entertainment has teamed up with Propagate, a studio co-founded by some of the talent formerly behind the US version of shows such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, Big Brother, The Office and MasterChef.

No information on when the Ticket to Ride series might hit TV screens has been given. The announcement of the show did give us an update look at how popular Moon’s board game has been since it was released 15 years ago, with over six million copies sold around the world.