Ticket to Ride: Rails and Sails is a Euro-style board game that has players building a combination of train routes and shipping lines to complete connections between various cities for points. It’s fun, but if you’re looking to purchase your first Ticket to Ride, I recommend the Europe edition instead since it is less complicated and the setup time is shorter.

The main reason that that Rails and Sails setup time takes so long is that each player must choose and then count out 60 game pieces from the available 25 trains and 50 ships in their colour (for “The World” ruleset). The trains and ships are quite small and both fill almost the exact same rectangular volume, so they often are accidentally mixed up. This ratio selection of game pieces is a critical strategy component of the game, so having a few less trains and a few extra ships can mess up your strategy.

I decided that I was tired of sorting the pieces by hand! I sought out to design a sorting device to make my life easier. First, let’s look at some data:

Rectangular dimensions of the game pieces	Length [mm]	Width [mm]	Height [mm]
Ship	24.9	7.8	11.3
Train	25.0	7.0	10.6

I initially was going to go all out and build a sorting machine that would sort the game pieces by colour and shape, but deemed that excessive for now… (until I went and did it for my capstone project, which should be finished in a few weeks!) I found an interesting design online for sorting coins, that used stacking sieves to sort the game pieces. I decided to adopt the method for this project. The thinner trains would slip through the cracks while not letting the ship pieces through. This design would also sort the large harbour pieces, but those were trivial to separate out.

During design, I had to perform several design and prototype iterations. Some of these iterations were because I needed getting my FDM 3D printer to print the correct dimensions, but since the dimensions I required were quite precise and my printer is not perfectly calibrated, I had to do some trial and error to find out the correct dimensions. Another iteration was due to the flex of the PLA – when the PLA was thin and long, as shown in the above picture, the rods became flexible like guitar strings. To fix this, I added perpendicular rods that crossed the guitar strings.

After these iterations, I was still noticing a few ships were sneaking through. Upon further observation, I realized that the ships were able to wriggle their way through the gap: the bottom of the sieve was just thin enough to allow the ships to hook their bow through a hole, twist, slide, then unhook the stern! This was fixed by increasing the thickness of the sieve, but was highly amusing to find. The process is shown in the below image.

Once I had the final product, I did some time trials to see if it was better than before. I found that the fastest I could manually sort 75 mixed game pieces of the same colour was 41 seconds. As long as the design matched this speed, it wins because it also uses much less mental energy to operate. The below graphs show that it takes 40 seconds to sort 83 game pieces. A win in my book!

The final product is shown in the video below. If you want the .STL files as well as the SolidWorks files, they can be downloaded from my Thingiverse object page.

Lastly, if you want to see the full report that includes some FEA, please check out the report I wrote. I was able to use this project to complete some class requirements. 🙂