Can Ticket to Ride First Journey be used as the base game for expansion games?

Question

I have never played any Ticket to Ride games before. I did, however, acquire two used games recently: Ticket to Ride First Journey and Ticket to Ride Japan.

I see that Ticket to Ride First Journey comes with trains and train cards. Ticket to Ride Japan says the following:

To play with this expansion, you need 20 Trains per player, the matching Scoring Markers and the Train Car cards taken from Ticket to Ride or Ticket to Ride Europe (the base game), along with the new components described below.

Does anyone know if Ticket to Ride First Journey can be used to play the Ticket to Ride Japan expansion game? Or do I have to have the original Ticket to Ride USA or Europe base game?

Thanks so much.

Answer 1

No, the First Journey box does not contain the pieces required to play with an expansion.

The base Ticket to Ride game contains:

• 1 Board map of North American train routes
• 225 Colored Train Cars
• 142 Illustrated cards (110 Train Card cards, 30 Destination Ticket cards, 1 summary and 1 Longest Route card)
• 5 Wooden Scoring Markers
• 1 Rules booklet

Of which the 225 Train Cars, 110 Train Car cards and 5 Scoring Markers are required to play with expansions.

By comparison, First Journey contains:

• 1 Game Board
• 80 Plastic Trains
• 72 Train Cards
• 32 Ticket Cards
• 4 Bonus Ticket Cards & 1 “Golden Ticket” Card
• 1 Rulesheet

You would have enough Trains to play the Japan map, but you would be missing about half the required number of Train cards which is likely to cause issues. And since most other expansion maps require the full set of Train Cars, you'd be missing those too. And you also have no score markers, although those could potentially be replaced by something else in a pinch.