Board games are one of my passions and when I decided to implement one, I went for Ticket to Ride which is a perfect canvas for Go: the board is a graph, the strategy is pathfinding, and the story is in the visuals.

We’ll see on how to build a simplified engine in Go using Go's data structures for routes and tickets, compare shortest‑path strategies with a Monte Carlo Tree Search policy and, if time permits, other AI models to choose the action to take, and then visualize them in an animated GIF that shows the effect of these actions on the board.

The talk mixes exploration and decision making with graph design, algorithm comparison and visual tools to display the game in action. It will be a playful session where we will show how Go is well capable to think, decide, and draw at the same time.