Ticket to Ride Boards Legendary Characters

Asmodee USA has a new promo item for Alan R. Moon's Ticket to Ride coming to stores in its Hobby Next network — Ticket to Ride: Legendary Characters.

This pack consists of five character cards and a rule card, with players drafting one character in counter-clockwise order starting with whoever goes last. The characters and their powers are:

• Irene Adler — before calculating the final score, discard up to two incomplete tickets, which now won't cost you points.
• Phileas Fogg — once per game, claim a route that's already been claimed by another player, otherwise following the normal rules for claiming route.
• Arsène Lupin — once per game, treat a route you're claiming as if it's a gray route, thereby allowing you to play a set of cards in the color of your choice.
• Captain Nemo — once per game, play up to seven cards on a single turn to claim one or more routes in a contiguous path, otherwise following normal route-claiming rules.
• Mina Harker — once per turn, when claiming a route, you can treat a pair of cards of the same color as a locomotive.

To get this mini-expansion, you need to purchase Ticket to Ride or Ticket to Ride: Europe at a participating Hobby Next store, although that might not be true for all participating stores as the item's page on the Hobby Next site says that in some cases "players may be invited to participate in a challenge organized on social media". Details will vary depending on the store. (My understanding is that participating stores receive a quantity of promos based on their initial order of the related game, with stores able to distribute these items in a manner they see fit as long as they don't sell the promos.)

I can understand the desire to acquire this expansion, as well as the frustration that might come with the thought that you'd need to buy another copy of the game to get it or that you have no Hobby Next store in your vicinity. In those cases, well, the abilities of the characters are listed above.

To expand on what I wrote in late July 2026 when announcing another hard-to-get promo item, companies do all this promo stuff to earn more money. I'm sure you know that. You might think, "I needed to buy Jessica a birthday gift anyway and she loves Ticket to Ride, so I'll get her a copy of the game and keep the promo as a treat for myself." If so, the marketing forces at asmodee have done their job — but try to avoid the feeling that your game is not complete if you can't get your hands on this promo.

If you never knew Legendary Characters existed, Ticket to Ride would still feel complete, yes? I mean, the game has been on the market for more than two decades and has been complete all that time without these five cards, so treat this item as a neat bonus if you can get your hands on it and otherwise ignore it...or print a homemade version. You can even create new characters yourself to expand on this idea. How about an Andrew Carnegie card that allows you to discard up to two trains or take up to two extra trains from the reserve once per game?