Ticket to Ride and .... Monsters?

I'm glad I can still be surprised, because if you asked me to come up with my top 20 guesses about the next Ticket to Ride expansion from Days of Wonder, "giant plastic city-stomping monsters" would not have made the list. I'll let the official press release fill in the details:

The two finely detailed monster figures of Alvin & Dexter turn any location they occupy into a City in Chaos– blocking routes from being built into or out of the city; and at game's end making any Destination Ticket to a city inhabited by either of them worth only half its normal point value. Players may move a single monster to a different city anytime during their turn by turning in 1 or 2 Locomotive wild cards and moving the monster up to 3 cities away for each card they discard. The player who moves Alvin (or Dexter) the most during the game will also earn a bonus. 

"Alvin the Alien and Dexter the Dino bring a lot of wacky fun to Ticket to Ride, making it the perfect post-Christmas gift for Ticket to Ride lovers", says the game's author, Alan R. Moon. "They also introduce a devious new tactical layer to the game that forces players to think about how to best use them and when to defend against them. Those who ignore Alvin and Dexter do so at their peril."

The Alvin & Dexter Monster expansion includes: 2 detailed plastic monster figures; 20 Monster cards; 2 Bonus cards; rules in 11 different languages; and comes packaged with a transparent window box displaying the 2 figures. Alvin & Dexter can be played with any complete stand-alone board game from the Ticket to Ride family. It will be available through game retailers worldwide beginning in February 2011. Suggested retail price is $13.

More pictures after the jump.