Ticket to Ride: London skips the Underground to travel by double-decker bus, black cab and yellow submarine

Ticket to Ride: London, the next game in the venerated train game series, has been given a release date and price tag – but no trains.

As we first revealed back in January, the upcoming small-box game follows in the wake of the shorter, faster and cheaper (and very, very good) Ticket to Ride: New York released last year, playing in around 10 to 15 minutes and costing only €20 (£17).

Set in the 1970s – the characters on the box are less-than-subtle nods to the Queen, John Lennon and the iconic dress sense of the era – Ticket to Ride: London sees players racing to complete routes across the capital.

The plastic trains of the main Ticket to Ride series and diddly taxi cabs of Ticket to Ride: New York have been replaced by plastic double-decker buses. The cards include milk floats, black cabs and even an homage to the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.

If you’re wondering why publisher Days of Wonder apparently passed up the chance to theme the game around the iconic London Underground tube network, it might have something to do with the legal hoops and royalties required to use the copyrighted Underground map.

Another change from New York is that London’s board appears to feature a scoring track around its edges, potentially replacing the score pad included with the previous game.

Replacing New York’s bonus scoring for travelling through tourist destinations are London’s districts, which grant extra points for linking up all the locations in a particular area of the city (Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Trafalgar Square and Piccadilyl Circus, for example) with an unbroken chain of buses. The rest of Ticket to Ride’s otherwise familiar gameplay remains largely untouched.

Ticket to Ride: London will be released this June.