Overview
My First Journey Europe strips Ticket to Ride Europe down to what a young kid can actually do at a table: collect coloured train cards, lay them down to claim short routes between cities, and try to finish six ticket cards before someone runs out of trains. No train stations, no tunnels — just the core loop, made small enough for small hands.
See also: Ticket to Ride Europe Review · How to Play Ticket to Ride Europe – Simplified
Ryan’s Review
Likes
- Same core gameplay as Ticket to Ride Europe, but stripped way down
- Still keeps alternative routes and wild cards, even without train stations
- The board is covered in little pictures of each destination — kids who can’t read yet just hunt for the picture
- Routes are short, one to three trains, so a kid can actually finish one
- Ticket cards are short too, so you sometimes draw one you’ve already half-finished or done — kids lose it over that
- Just two things to do on your turn: draw train cards or play trains
- Quick to set up
Dislikes
- The board gets cluttered once trains pile up, and kids struggle to spot an alternate route once the direct one’s taken
Getting It to the Table
We already had the full Ticket to Ride Europe in the collection, so this felt like the obvious next step once the kids were old enough to want in but not old enough to handle tunnels and train stations. It plays almost exactly like the real thing, just with the fiddly parts sanded off.
Thoughts
It’s Ticket to Ride Europe with the training wheels on. Same city map, same idea of connecting two places with coloured trains, same wild cards for when you’re stuck. What’s gone is train stations — no sneaking past a rival’s claimed route by planting a station there. For a first game, that’s the right call. One less rule for a six-year-old to track, and honestly the routes are short enough that you rarely need the workaround anyway.
The routes are built for kids to actually complete. Most connections are one to three trains long. In the full Europe map you’re sometimes staring down a six-train route that eats your whole hand. Here, a kid can look at their ticket, look at the board, and see the finish line.
The pictures on the board are the best part. Every city has a little illustration next to its name — a landmark, something recognizable. Our kids who can’t fully read yet just scan for the picture that matches their ticket card. It turns “find Paris” into a little treasure hunt instead of a reading exercise, and it’s the detail that makes this a genuinely kid-designed game rather than just a shrunk-down adult one.
Sometimes you draw a ticket you’ve basically already finished. Because the ticket deck isn’t deep, you’ll occasionally flip a card for a route you completed two turns ago, or one you’re one train away from. The kids get genuinely excited when that happens — it feels like a lucky break, and it keeps the pace moving since nobody’s ever too far from their next win.
The board gets messy fast. Once a few players have trains down everywhere, a young kid can lose track of which routes are still open. We’ve had to step in more than once and point out the long way around — “you can’t go straight to that city anymore, but you can get there through this other one, and you’ve basically already built half of it.” It’s not a dealbreaker, but it means an adult stays semi-involved even in a “kids’ game,” at least for the first several plays.
The finish line keeps kids engaged. The game ends when someone completes six tickets or someone runs out of trains — and in our experience, our kids almost always want to play it out until the trains run dry rather than stopping early. That’s a good sign for a kids’ game. They’re not asking to quit; they’re asking to keep going.
Setup is fast, which matters more with kids than with adults. Board down, shuffle two small decks, deal starting hands, go. No fussing with tunnel tiles or station pieces to explain first.
Conclusion
My First Journey Europe does exactly what it’s supposed to: it takes a game we already loved and makes it something our kids can actually play and finish on their own. The picture-hunting on the board is a small touch that makes a real difference for pre-readers. Our kids ask for it by name, and that’s the whole review right there.
Thumbnail image artificially generated for illustrative purposes.
