If you go down to the woods today
Throughout my time in the tabletop hobby I’ve never been very flush with cash. I choose the games I buy carefully, considering how likely they are to gel with my regular groups. I think about how they fit in my collection and what I might write about it should the mood take me. I still don’t always get it right. This restriction has mean that I respect a game that gives me a lot in a small, and affordable, package. Trailblazers does just that.
Trailblazers is from publisher Bitewing Games designed by Ryan Courtney, with art from Seth Lucas. The game comes in a variety of formats but I will be reviewing the travel edition that comes in this charming travel case, complete with carabiner.
I bought Trailblazers with my own money. I have no affiliation with the publisher or designer.
Ryan Courtney is probably best known for thinky tile layer Pipeline. Here Ryan takes those tile laying sensibilities and tasks you with building out your own trail centre in the middle of a forest. People from miles around will come to spend their time here and they want the best hiking, cylcing, and kayaking around. Unfortunately there is one thing in the way. Your poor planning, and other players disruptive choices.
Over 4 rounds you will draft these long rectangular cards to try and make large, point scoring trails. These trails snake out from camps, with each camp representing one of the three sports: cycling, walking, and kayaking. I don’t believe that any other sports have been invented yet.
In the first round you have a blank canvas in front of you. You are dealt 8 cards each of which depicts the various routes. It is now up to you to choose your first camp. Established, you now select a card to play and attach it to the camp. One, or more, trails will now be snaking out from the camp but it isn’t until they return to base that they will score you those points.
As you pass your hand possibilties disappear and a new set of issues are handed to you. Play, pass, place until all but one is left. This last one is discarded to the bin of history, its possibilities fogotten (for this game at least).
This seems gentle so far. The drafting gives a bit of friction between players. However the worst problems always come from past you. From round 2 a second camp enters and now you find yourself looping paths through and around each other in a bid for points. Round 3 gives you the final camp, pushing you further down the hole of “plans gang aft agley”. Round 4 there is no new camp, giving you a little bit of room to breath, look across your works and ask “What on earth have I done?!”.
Thankfully the game is quite generous with how you place cards. Each one must be placed so it touches another card or camp. Cards can also be overlapped, just not across camps. You can cover previous placements partially or in the entirety. This can get you out of many a tricky situation, or send you hurtling into a new one of your own design.
Now you are not just conenting with your poor choices and what someone just handed you. You have objectives as well for some bonus points. One set of these belongs to the end of the game. With 3 of them it is almost impossible to achieve them all (at least I’ve never managed it). They often involve longest routes and similar, creating a race amongst the players with diminishing returns as folk cross the finish line.
The other set is achieved during play and if the endgame objectives are a marathon, these are a sprint. Each one asks you to manipulate your path in certain ways: make sure 2 of your camps have no empty space around them, 2 camps with 3 loops each, the kayaking loop snaking round the other two camps as some examples.
These objectives give shape to the paths you are making. No longer are you just aiming for long winding paths. Now you are building with a purpose. So is everyone else mind you, allowing you to anticipate their needs and counter draft where you can. You don’t even have to come first to get some extra points, meaning that the objectives stay in play for the whole game, tempting you to push that little bit further for an extra point or three.
I have really enjoyed my time with the base game of trailblazers, but we aren’t out of the woods quite yet. We have instead come upon some animals.
My head is an animal
As is common with crowdfunded games there is an expansion with the main game, yes even in the tiny travel edition I am covering. What isn’t as common is that it is actually good.
You’ll maybe have spied some animals on some of the cards. These aren’t merely decoration, they can be used for more points with the animals expansion. When you play a card down that shows an animal you can put a matching token on that card. This means the card no longer be covered in any way. Oh no! However, that path will accumulate an exponential increasing number of points for each different animal along its route. Of course with all of the cards containing mulitple bits of potentially different routes this means you can get real smart with how you use this power.
This adds another layer to the game of anticipation. Do you lock this card in place now, hoping that it will pay off down the line? Are you going to regret not putting that eagle down? It is basically an expansion that asks you to think about how confident you are in your decisions. That is a simple, but agonising, question to answer! With the animals expansion you now have 3 ways to score: paths, animals on paths, and objectives. Mixing up your strategy each game I have found a really compelling reason to break out Trailblazers when I can.
Muddy Paws
I picked up Trailblazers at Ancient Robot Games on my wedding anniversary and my wife and I played it on a tiny table in a lovely pub. We both immdediatedly took to it and enjoyed its mix of spatial puzzle and drafting trickiness. It really shines as a two player game but I have played it at 3 and 4 as well with equal success.
Trailblazers sits in that space of games that are easy to explain but fiendish to do well at. Although it does have low direct interaction between players, it always feels like you are jostling for position. As you race to objectives you consider each hand and contemplate the paths you could place, you realise just how much you can affect each other. Its a masterful piece of design that is confident in its confident in its aims and joyful in its execution.
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