Without an explanation for missing its Wednesday debut, Ticket to Ride Europe just arrived on XBLA to pick up customers for the weekend.

The expansion to the digitized European board game costs 600 MS points ($7.50), which is far cheaper than the $30+ set in real life. We haven't downloaded the Europe expansion yet, but let us know if the red/orange color similarity issue found in Ticket to Ride has been fixed.

Update: It's finally here ... two days late.

Considering it was supposed to be released today, a few people have been asking us: What happened to XBLA's Ticket to Ride Europe expansion? We really don't know. We tried contacting developer Playful Entertainment and pretty much anyone we know at Microsoft. Nobody is talking. Our next try is to check with the butcher and the baker, but typically the liquor store guy always knows what's going on.

We'll be sure to update as soon as someone decides to explain why the train is late to the station.

XBLA's excellent Ticket to Ride is ready to cross the Atlantic to receive the Europe expansion board next Wednesday. According to developer Playful Entertainment, the new continent will cost 600 MS points ($7.50) and add new gameplay elements like ferries, tunnels and train stations.

In the retail board game world, Ticket to Ride and Ticket to Ride: Europe -- which are sold separately -- would cost over $60, so we're not that sore about getting both on XBLA for $17.50. No word yet if the painfully close red/orange color blending will be fixed on the new board.

"Spiel des jahres" 2004, Zug um Zug Ticket to Ride, is laying tracks and will be ready to pick up passengers from Xbox Live Arcade this Wednesday. The game is the debut title from Vancouver-based Playful Entertainment and will cost 800 MS Points ($10). Ticket to Ride joins other German board-to-digital leapers, Catan and Carcassonne.

Also arriving this week is Happy Tree Friends: False Alarm, which aims to deliver ten levels of action-puzzle ultra violence. Happy Tree Friends costs 800 MS Points ($10) and is rated "M," obviously. Ticket to Ride is rated "E," by the way, unless you use the Vision cam ... then an "AO" happening is never far behind.

The German Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle (USK) is no stranger to revealing unannounced titles and Xblah.net points out they've done it again. The highlight for fans of XBLA board game translations like Catan and Carcassonne is that Zug um Zug Ticket to Ride is ready to build railways on Xbox 360.

Other games rated by the USK are Penny Arcade's OtR-SPD, RooGoo, and Golf: Tee it Up! None of these ratings mean the games are coming out soon, but at least they're on their way.

[Via X3F]

Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column about card games, board games, and everything else non-digital.

"Non-digital games are awesome" is the line I usually insist upon in this column. But even awesome analog games have their faults: namely, if you don't have anyone to play with, you can't really play.

So, as an end-of-year treat, let's look back at the last year+ of games reviewed, and find some ways to play those suckers against some internet folk:

Settlers of Catan
I still haven't gotten around to reviewing Settlers, but I did chat with Brian Reynolds about the Xbox Live Arcade version of the game, which is probably the best bet for consistent, high-volume net play.

For those who don't have an Xbox 360 (like, well, me), Aso Brain Games hosts an unofficial, Java-based version of the game called Xplorers. After a free registration, the site allows users to player ranked and un-ranked versions against other users and bots, and features a number of expansion and additions to the base rules, which can be toggled on or off. Don't let the low-fi look of the site dissuade you; Xplorers is a well-put-together Settlers clone, with a solid interface and a consistent number of users online at any time.

Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column about card games, board games, and everything else non-digital.

Alan R. Moon's Ticket to Ride is widely considered to be one of the greatest board games of the last decade, but the reason for this may elude players at first. After all, Ticket to Ride is deceptively simplistic, with a weak fiction to justify a gameplay mechanic that's little more than connecting dots on a board. Players who invest in the experience, however, can quickly find that Moon's award-winning game is greater than the sum of its parts.

The original version of Ticket to Ride takes place in North America at the turn of the 20th century. Players compete to travel around the U.S. (and parts of Canada), claiming various train routes between cities in order to earn points. The game would like you to believe that it's a grand race across the country; even the back of the box states that the objective is to travel to the most cities by train in just 7 days. Unfortunately, the rules and gameplay don't really justify this grandiose storyline.