Ticket to ride 10.000$ map competition

[ravells]

I've just re-read the rules again, and I think this condition is a potential rip-off (tilt ignore my comments in the CL forum). I hadn't realised that what they expect you to do is to essentially design a new game based on their engine. For those of you you have not played ticket to ride, the board is a map of a location (I've got the US version, I think there's a Europe version as well). Cities are joined by railroad track and each section of track is split into a number of rectangles. Players have plastic trains of a particular colour (each the size of a rectangle) which through card play, they can place on the rectangles until they connect up cities. At the start of the game players are dealt destination cards (e.g. Chicago to Los Angeles) and if they can connect those destinations, then they get extra points.

This competition is more than just making a map, it's doing all the play testing so that the product stands as a ready to play game, you also have to design the cards. What this means is if you do, say, South America and someone else does Africa, and the Africa player wins there is nothing to stop Days of Wonder from releasing a subsequent South America game based on all of your play testing and the map and cards you've drawn. Not that I stood a ghosts chance of winning this, but I think I'll be passing on this out of principle. I'm going to check out Boardgame Geek and see what they're saying there about it.