Game summary:
A game for 2 – 4 players
Play time 45 – 60 minutes
Designer: Charlie Bink
Artist: Csaba Bernáth, Sebastián Koziner, Marta Danecka, Aleksey Shirokikh, Alexey Shirokikh
Publisher: Underdog Games
Unboxing
The Game Trayz insert contains the following components:
– Rulebook
– 1 Map Board
– 1 Bag
– 48 Destination cards
– 5 Trekkers
– 5 Suitcase Mats
– 5 Player Aid Cards
– 1 Score Pad
– 12 Journey cards
– 75 Trek cards
– 48 Souvenir cubes (12 of each color)
– 10 Region Bonus tokens
– 30 VP Tokens
– 4 Most Souvenirs tiles
The pink player is going to move 2 steps to Sagrada Familia, you can just use the 2 cards with number 1 on it or just a card with number 2 on it (if you have it in your hand).
The setup for the 4 Tour cards with the 3 VP and the 5 VP on top of it. When one of these four cards are chosen by any player for a Tour, just move all of cards on the left of the chosen cards one space up to the right.
Let’s get it to the table
Place the Map in the middle of the table.
Then you have to shuffle and place the Souvenir cubes on the board, but when you play with 2 or 3 player you have to return some cubes back to the box. With 2 players, you have to return 3 cubes of each color back to the box and with 3 players you have to place one red and one blue and two yellow and two white back to the box. When this is all done, you just shuffle the bag and place al the cubes random on the board. But with 2 players not on the +3 and +4 and with 3 players not on the +4 locations.
Place the 4 most Souvenirs tiles near the board with the corresponding players.
Then shuffle all the Region bonus tokens and randomly choose 6 of them and place them at each region on the board.
Shuffle the Destinations cards and place them near the board. Take the top 4 cards and place them faced up next to this deck, above the 2 most right cards you have to place the tray that holds the 3VP and 5 VP tokens. When this is done, you’ll shuffle the both Journey cards and randomly choose and A and a B card and place them on the board (in China).
Shuffle also the Trek cards and create a deck on the bottom of the board, also take the top 4 cards and place them faced up next to this deck. Then give each player 3 cards, this is their starting hand.
Before we start playing, every player also chooses a color and take one Trekker and the matching Suitcase. If it’s your first time to play, then also take a Player Aid cards, this one really helps you during the game.
Now we’re ready to play!
The player who recently went to an airport is the first player, but in this time travel is a bit hard so we randomly choose a first player. Each player now takes a card from the Trek deck and the player with the highest number card begins. All drawn cards are placed at the bottom of the Treck deck.
The first player chooses an airport and then place his Trekker on this airport. Then the next player and so on until all players at airfield have chosen to start. But beware, you may never have 2 Trekkers on the same airport.
Each player takes a turn and at your turn you have 2 phases. But before you take these actions and if you’re on an airport you can fly to another airport.
1. Move, if you have at least one Trek card then you’ll have to move to another location. If you don’t have any cards, then you’ll take to cards from the Trek deck, doesn’t matter of you take open cards or closed cards or a combination.
2. Choose, you can choose a second action to perform;
– Draw 2 new Trek cards;
– Take a Tour;
– Take a Journey action.
1. Move phase:
If you’re able to move, you can go to any location you want, with the cards you have in your hand. Announce to which location you want to move and then play the cards from your hand, you can also combine cards. The number of steps you take must match the numbers on the card(s) you travel. E.g. if you want to take 3 steps, the number of the cards must also be 3 and you may not discard 2 cards with 2×2 steps and let that one step be dropped.
Then move your Trekker to the new location, if there’s a Souvenir cube then you take this cube and place it into your Suitcase.
There are a few rules for moving;
– When a route is blocked by another player, they block the whole route. So you have to take another route.
– You may not use a connection more then once!
– The airport locations are used as a normal connection
– When you land on a space with no cube, you still can stay there but you don’t receive anything.
Collecting Souvenirs
Each time you land on a place with a cube, just take the cube. You place each cube on the leftmost open space, when you filled each single slot you’ll place it in the long slot. The cubes in the long shot doesn’t count anymore for points only for the most Souvenirs Tile.
Claiming a Most Souvenirs Tile
When you have at least 2 cubes of the same color, you can take the corresponding tile and place it in front of you. When another player has more cubes then you from that type of Souvenirs, then that player takes the Most Souvenirs Tile from you.
Collecting a Region Bonus
When you take the last cube from a region, there are 6 different regions, then you take the Region Bonus token and place it in front of you. This token is worth points at the end of the game, on the token you’ll see the number of points it is worth.
2. Choose
After you have moved, you must take one of the following actions;
Draw two cards from the Trek deck
Take two new cards into your hand. You can choose 1 or 2 open cards or just 1 or 2 cards from the main deck. When you choose a card that is faced up, you replace it immediately with a new card and then take a second card. There no hand size limit.
When the deck is completely empty, take the cards from the discard pile. Shuffle these cards and create a new Trek deck.
Take a Tour
Will you take this action? Then you must make sure your Trekker is in the same location as one of the 4 open Destination cards. In addition to the location, you must also meet the icons on the corresponding Destination card. When you meet all of these, then you can take it on a tour. Take the card and put it next to your suitcase. Note that the numbers on the card do not count now! It’s now only about the icons on the card, each card counts as 1 icon.
If the Destination card is one of the two on the right, you will receive 3VP or 5VP respectively and also take the appropriate score token. Should you run out of 5VP for any reason, move the 3VP tokens to the rightmost token. Should these ever run out as well, there are no additional VP to be gained by taking a tour.
After receiving a card for a guided tour, move the card or cards to the right, then a new card for a guided tour is placed on the free space.
Journey
You can perform this action by choosing a travel card from the board. There are always two cards face up and they are the same for each player, during the game they are not removed and/or replaced by new cards. You may also play a travel card more than once during the game.
Once you wish to perform this action, you must discard two identical cards (icons) to the discard pile. The numbers on the cards do not count here either.
Then perform the action, where there are more actions on the card perform them from top to bottom.
After choosing a 2nd action, your turn ends and the next player is up. See next topic when the game ends.
Example of a few Journey cards
Here’s an example of a Tour card., next to the 16 VP you see the type of cards you need for this Tour. 1 Red (Photography), 1 Yellow (Trek) and a purple (history) card. Then you just take the card from the row and place it next to you.
A few examples of Tour cards, on the other side of the card there’s also information about the location. On both sides you also see in which region this location is located, you can see this by the color of the region.
Game ends
The game ends in two different ways:
– 5 of the 6 Regions bonus tokens have been claimed
– A player Tours his fifth Destination card.
When one of these two things happen, the player that has triggered the end finishes their turn and then the game ends.
Now the final scoring starts
When you start counting the points, you really need to use the score pad. This shows each item scoring points and what you have to count.
– Count the Most Souvenirs tiles that you collected;
– Destination cards Toured;
– Souvenir Sets collected in your suitcase;
– Region Bonus tokens collected & Victory tokens collected.
Counting Souvenir Sets:
For counting the Souvenir Sets you have to look at your suitcase. Each set of Souvenirs is 4 different cubes, you’ll receive the points that are under the rightmost full set of Souvenirs.
Here is an example of a player who has collected the most souvenirs for both the color blue and white. Therefore this player receives the cards for these two souvenirs. As soon as another player has collected more souvenirs, he receives them from the player who had the card. At the end of the game these are worth extra points!
At the end of the game, you’re going to see how many different souvenirs you’ve collected. You must have scored 4 different points to receive the bonus at the bottom. In this example, this player has two rows with four different souvenirs, therefore this player receives 10 points.
The inlay of the game, this makes everything look nice and keeps everything neatly in place, even when you put the game down in your game cabinet. It also looks nice when you put it on the table and you can quickly set up the game through it.
Final Conclusion & rating:
Weight: 1 / 5
Replayability: 8
My rating: 🎲 🎲 🎲 🎲 🎲 🎲 🎲
Set up of the game
Setting up the game is not very much work, within a few minutes you are ready to play. Most of the time it takes to place the Souvenir cubes, partly because you have to consider the number of players, but then you also have to spread them out on the board. The other components such as the cards, Most Souvenir tiles and Bonus tokens can be placed fairly quickly. Is it the first time you play the game, then it is recommended to start with the following 2 travel cards;
A; Exchange Rate;
B; Catch me if you can.
This is for the first time 2 relatively easy travel cards, but after the first time you can really play with any variant and I would recommend choosing these ‘blind’.
The Destination cards are all shuffled well and then you put 4 of them face down. Above these 2 right cards you place the tray with the 3VP and 5Vp. What does help is that everything is stored in the Gametrayz insert. This is another very nice insert from Gametrayz and makes playing and setting up very fun.
Quality of the components
You can see that at Underdog Games they really went for quality of game components. What I really like is that on the various game pieces you see everything that has to do with travel, for example on the Region tokens you see the entire world map and on the VP tokens you see a compass. The Trekkers are also all slightly different, making it not only a different color but also a different Tractor. lastly, I have to say that again, they used Gametrayz. No matter how you slice it, these are still very good inserts and it makes me very happy when I see them. Setting up a game becomes so much more fun.
But what really stands out are the Destination cards, I think this is really an asset to the game. Where they could have chosen for only a location, they have chosen here for nice graphics of the location but on the back also an interesting explanation of the location. This makes it even more fun to not only go for the most famous Destinations but also for even lesser known Destinations. In case you don’t know where a certain location is, they have placed on both the front and the back the continent where this Destination is located.
Overall impression of the game
Trekking the World is a very fun game, in terms of rules it is not very difficult and you can start after a short explanation and setting up the board. Trekking the world is especially for the novice player a very nice game, you can compare it with Ticket to Ride but at the same time you should not compare both games. We enjoyed playing the game immensely, with different players, especially experienced players but you do notice that the game can then maybe sometimes be a little too easy. What we really liked was that you can sometimes block a route for another player, so you can sometimes frustrate each other. The use of Journey cards is highly recommended, sometimes you can complete a Destination card faster or easier or maybe move a player to another place. What can still be a challenge is the number of points you want to score with collecting souvenirs. Because you want to collect as many as 4 different souvenirs at the end of the game, this can sometimes be a fun challenge.
The box of the game, as well as the shipping box looks very cool. I think it’s very nicely designed and you feel like unwrapping everything quickly, partly because of the box in which the publisher also mentions that they want to bring the joy of travelling to everyone. Well this box but also the way the rest is designed makes you really want to travel!
My final conclusion is Trekking the World is an enjoyable game and I really recommend it for those players who are looking for a fun and entertaining game for a game night. You can easily play a few games during your game night, because there are so many Destination cards you won’t get bored quickly.
I want to thank Underdog Games for letting me review Trekking the World! Take a look at their website, besides this game they also have another beautiful game Trekking the National Parks, where you visit the American national parks and experience their unique qualities. But keep following them, there will be more news about new games soon!
