Ticket to Ride Dice

Ticket to Ride is probably my favourite recent Spiel des Jahres winner. Some years the prize seems to have been going to rather dubious games: I quite like Zooloretto, though it is just a reworking of an earlier game. The same is also true of this year's winner, Keltis, which I've not yet played, and seems to have got somewhat mixed reviews.
Ticket to Ride, winner in 2004, is probably the last really great game to have scooped the prize. It's by Alan Moon, and therefore involves a lot of wanting to do three things at the same time - collecting cards that let you build things, spending the building cards and collecting ticket cards that earn points by connecting cities. Since other people are trying to get cards in the same suits as you, and connect cities using railway lines you had you eye on, you're generally torn between piling up building cards and rushing to get routes built, with the destination tickets a bit of an afterthought, even if it is an afterthought that winds up winning the game for you.
Since publication there have been a slew of variants and spin offs. The original American map was followed by Europe, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia, most of which offer different little twiddles. Europe is probably the most balanced. There's a pure card game, but it's the kind of memory game I'm no good at. Now we get a dice game.
The dice game's actually not a game of itself, it's an alternative to building railway connection through collecting and spending cards. There are five dice, showing track, stations or locomotives. You throw the lot and re-roll as many as take your fancy. The two different types of track let you build on single or double lines of track, the stations let you collect additional tickets. Un-used pairs of dice let you collect tokens that give you an additional build your next go. There are three penalty dice that come in while building tunnels in Europe, Switzerland or Scandinavia.
So how does it compare?
The big difference between the cards and the dice is that the game goes much quicker. In traditional cards based TtR the game goes in fits and spurts. There's a degree of brinkmanship going on as everyone starts collecting huge hands of cards, eventually though someone starts building and there's a phase of everyone laying track as fast as they can, or at least until their hands of cards run out, at which point people go back to collecting cards, perhaps collecting new tickets and the whole thing starts again.
With the dice there's none of that. Every turn you throw the dice, throw some of them again, and then you either build or collect tickets. in the game we played last week, Europe with three players, we only a couple of times went for tickets, everything else was throw and build, throw and build. There was never any reason not to get on and build. In the card based game there comes a point half way through, when the initial objectives are secure and the cards available to be drawn look unhelpful, that you want to get some more tickets, if nothing else to give you an objective to build towards. With the dice you don't get that breathing space, even with two players who're famously fond of collecting lots of tickets we just didn't find ourselves with the time to do it.
It's a different game, but it seemed to work. I'd certainly try it again.