Ticket To Ride Online: 15 Million Games Played Since 2004

The online version of Ticket to Ride, launched in 2004, reached a new milestone earlier this year, with 15 million games played. The online game has both benefited from and helped grow the boardgame, with strong connections back and forth. Now the relationship between the online and meatspace games is changing, but both TTR games will still feed the other.

From launch until recently, players got full access to the online game either through a Web code included in the board games, or by buying six or twelve month subscriptions. “Guests” were allowed to play free, but couldn’t initiate their own games to track their history or ranking information.

The Web codes in the board games not only helped convert boardgame players to online players, they also allowed Days of Wonder to track the percentage of players that played the online game first who ended up buying boardgames. That percentage has been “in double digits,” according to DoW Vice President Mark Kaufman.

The company recently changed that system; the online subscriptions and related boardgame sales weren’t enough to pay for the number of players that were playing for free as Guests, according to Kaufman. DoW recently started selling one-time subscriptions to the main game for $9.99, and expansions for $4.99 each. Up to four free trial games are offered, but the ability to play on an ongoing basis as a Guest has been eliminated. The conversion from the old system to the new one did provide benefits to past boardgame or online subscription purchasers. Boardgame players do still receive benefits from their Web codes in the form of access to Community Tools and discount coupons.

The number of Ticket to Ride games played daily is now bigger than ever, according to Kaufman, both because of these changes and because the company recently launched upgraded versions of the online games. This unique interaction between the boardgame and online versions of the Ticket to Ride franchise seems poised to continue to build both.

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Days Of Wonder Announces Exclusive Agreement With Diamond, Alliance

Days of Wonder, the publisher of top-quality board and card games, announced today an exclusive distribution agreement with Alliance Game Distributors and its parent company Diamond Comic Distributors.

Effective immediately, Alliance and Diamond become the sole distributor of Days of Wonder’s English language games to hobby retailers in North and South America. In addition they will also provide distribution to retailers and sub-distributors in the Pacific Rim region. Days of Wonder’s European subsidiary will continue to work directly with its current distribution partners in Europe, and these relationships remain unaffected by this agreement.

“This exclusive distribution agreement was the obvious next step for us in today’s economic environment. We expect the industry’s on-going consolidation to accelerate, and would rather lead than follow. More importantly, we believe this move will allow us to progressively deliver significant new benefits to our retail customers, in the form of Organized Play events and new in-store support and promotions.” says Days of Wonder CEO, Eric Hautemont. “By using Alliance’s expertise to manage all of our logistics and leveraging their sales reach to nearly every hobby game retailer, we can focus on the things we do best -developing games that consumers want and retailers find easy to sell. Just as importantly, for the first time, we now have real-time data on how all our products are doing in the marketplace. This will enable us to develop and deliver vastly better marketing and sales tools for our retailers, and will ensure we can manage our inventory better to prevent product shortages.”

New BattleLore Expansion in this week – Scottish Wars

Our Featured item this week is the new expansion for BattleLore: Scottish Wars – A Dwarven Perspective, from Days Of Wonder.

Scottish Wars – Days Of Wonder