Game summary
👥 A game for 1 to 5 players
⏳ Play time is around 40 – 100 minutes
🏢 Publisher is Pektis Studio
Introduction
In Wanderlust: Discover the World, you will travel around the world. You will try to visit as many destinations as possible, plan your routes wisely, and earn points along the way by making good combinations. The game is all about timing, traveling efficiently, and collecting the right cards to plan your world trip as well as possible.
Let’s get it on the table
Wanderlust: Discover the World is a travel-themed board game in which players try to visit destinations around the world, plan routes, and collect transport cards while competing against each other for points.
Place the game board on the table and lay out the different types of cards in their designated places, such as the destination cards, transport cards, 3 general objective cards, and the … cards.
Place 3 destination cards face up and place the tokens on these 3 destinations on the game board.
Make sure you have 5 transport cards (train, boat, plane, etc.) face up and ready. You will use these cards to move around and plan routes.
Each player chooses a player piece (colored marker) and places it on the starting position. Give each player 2 ticket cards, 1 personal objective, and 1 personal destination card.
The player who has recently traveled may start.
Let’s play
During the game, you visit different cities on the map. To get there, you need transport cards, such as airplane, train, or boat cards. You use these to travel from one destination to another. You may only travel to one of the three open destinations.
By choosing the right routes, you can earn extra points, for example if you take a longer route to reach a destination. For every card you use, except for a joker card, you receive 1 travel point. So if you manage to travel to a location with 8 cards, for example, you receive 8 travel points.
A turn proceeds as follows. You can draw cards to replenish your hand, travel to one of the open locations, or collect souvenirs, take photos, or send letters at a location. When you travel, you move your token across the world map and mark the location you visited. You discard the cards you used and then draw new ones.
During the game, you collect souvenirs and photos from your trips, which earn you extra points at the end. There are also goals you can try to achieve, such as visiting three cities in Asia or traveling with each type of transportation. These goals force you to make choices: do you go for speed or efficiency?
The game ends as soon as one player has achieved 2 central goal cards, after which each player has 1 more turn.
After this, all points earned by players for their destinations, goals, and extra bonuses are counted. The player with the most points wins and can call themselves the ultimate world traveler.
Final Conclusion & rating
Weight: 2.13/ 5
Replayability: 7
Our rating: 7 out of 10 dices
Wanderlust is a great game to play, with rules that are short and clear. The game is quick to set up and looks colorful on the table.
The game flows quickly in terms of turns, but you sometimes have to wait a while for real action on the board because you have to move directly to a location, and that can take a while because you have to wait for the right tickets. This is also the disadvantage of the game: you first have to collect the tickets to travel to a location before you can actually travel there. As a result, someone else may beat you to it and take that location right out from under your nose. The advantage, however, is that you may then have enough tickets to travel somewhere else, but you also want to take a good look at the different destination cards to score points and the tokens such as letters, photos, or souvenirs, because those sets will earn you a few extra points.
Thematically, the game is really well put together and makes for a great family game. We found the playing time to be more than adequate. You can also make the game a little more difficult, but we think this makes the game a little less fun. With multiple players, it will take a little longer, and with some goal cards, this will certainly have an impact on the playing time.
If you love games like Trekking the World and Trekking the National Parks, then this is a fun recommendation. But it is very similar to the first game, Trekking the World.
As mentioned, we enjoyed playing Wanderlust, but it’s not a keeper for our game collection.
Thanks to Pektis Studio for this review copy and the opportunity to write about it.
