TRAILS (2021)

PLAYERS	TIME	DESIGNER	PUBLISHER
2-4	20-40 mins	Henry Audubon	Henry Audubon

In this 2-4 player game you’ll be making your way back and forth along the trail, picking up resources and using them to collect Badge cards.

If you’ve played PARKS, you’ll get the general vibe of TRAILS. It’s an extremely similar yet trimmed version.

TRAILS has the same beautiful art style of its big brother, but the main draw of those amazing National Park cards is gone. Here the art remains only on the small Photo cards.

The rest of the cards are mostly just large icons and they get repeated across the Badge cards.

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For the first few plays of TRAILS I thought we had a real winner on our hands. Sure, it appeared as a more budget PARKS, so the shaped wooden resources were gone. But it played smoothly and was easy to get out and set up.

But repeated plays began to bore me as the game became a tennis match of players zipping left and right across the trail. And it gets quite frustrating when you get to the end and the card(s) you were specifically saving for are gone.

Several rounds my plans were changed and I was too few steps away from the end of the trail to do anything about it.

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The trail itself is modular, and while this improves repeated plays in many games, here it just gives the potential for affecting the dynamic of the game. Certain spots in certain orders could alter the way the game played out.

It was also rare for tactics to be different between players. We’re mostly heading to the same need at trail end, so we’re all collecting in the same order.

But first player has the advantage, so they will probably get the card(s) first. Everyone else is just hoping the next revealed cards use the same resources.

Overall, TRAILS is an okay game. Perhaps if PARKS didn’t exist then it might have shone more. But of the two, I’d rather own PARKS because TRAILS doesn’t have the staying power or wow factor.