steam and circuitry

One of my favorite games is Ticket to Ride (despite its silly name), in which a strategic element is choosing tickets: pairs of cities to be joined. The value of a ticket is the length of the shortest path that could fulfill it.

It occurs to me that, if each segment of track is considered as a resistor, the resistance between two cities may be considered a measure of the difficulty of the ticket: you’re less likely to be blocked if redundant paths exist. One could then make a list of tickets ranked by payoff divided by resistance. But each move changes this: after a route is claimed, it has zero resistance for its owner and infinite resistance for others.

Your first act in the game is to choose two or more tickets from a draw of three or four or five; it’s not obvious how to apply this idea to find the most compatible set.

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