On The Road

• Designers: Gabriele Bubola and Leo Colovini
• Publisher: Helvetiq
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by Helvetiq

In On the Road, you play music bands that want to reach the Sunshine Festival with the most fans. During the game, you travel throughout the land in order to gather the highest number of fans. To win, you need to make sure they will also make it to the Festival to see you on stage — and won’t get stuck in line at the toilet. On your turn, play a movement card to visit new places or travel back to beloved festivals. Each tile represents a different landscape. The more often you visit a type of landscape, the more fans you will get there, i.e., stars you place in a bag. On the night tiles, you get a chance to draw from the bag. Your fans will be invited to watch you play, whereas other bands’ fans will be sent to queue for the toilet. The game ends when all the tickets for the Festival are sold. The winning band is the one with the most fans on the floor.

To set up, you must first make up the road, starting with the start tile, then 7 location tiles at random, then a city tile, 7 location, city, 6 location, final stage.  The red tickets are placed near the stage, with 1 note ticket on top, getting larger to 4 note ticket on bottom.  The toilet tile is placed near the road.   The location tokens are placed nearby. Each player places their van on the start tile and takes all the fans (stars) of their color. 3 Stars for each player are placed in the bag to start the game.  Finally, the deck of movement cards is shuffled and each player gets a hand of 3 cards.

On a turn, the active player goes through three phases

1] Play a card – play a card from your hand and move forward that number of spaces. If you start on a van tile, you can move forward the value of the card, forward twice the value of the card or move backwards the value of the card.  When you stop, take a location token of the color tile you landed on.  If you land on a van tile, city tile or the final stage tile, take a pink token instead.  (You can see which token you get by the icon in the lower left of the tile).  If there are no tokens left, you may instead place one of your fans from the porta-potty and place it in the bag.  

If you end on a mountain, lake, forest or field, you have a concert. Look at the number of location tokens you have matching the current space and add that many fans to the bag.

If you end on the final space (which can happen if your count pushes you past the final space as well) – take the topmost ticket from the stack.  For the rest of the game, you do not play cards. You simply take a pink location token and then move to the drawing from the bag step.

2] Draw a movement card – draw back up to 3 cards in your hand

3] Draw fans from the bag – if you are on a city tile or the final stage tile, draw fans at random from the bag equal to the number of notes you have on the pink location and ticket tiles in front of you.  Any fans of your color are placed on the scoring tile.  All other tiles are placed on the porta-potty tile.

Note that there are some special actions that can be taken by discarding different colored location tokens – some are done on your turn, some can be done when your opponents are taking their turns:

• 2 tokens – after you draw fans, return all the fans you drew, and then draw again
• 3 tokens – before you draw fans, place all your fans on the porta potty into the bag. 
• 2 tokens – after an opponent draws fans from the bag, discard two tokens to have your fans placed back in the bag instead of on the porta-potty tile
• 4 tokens – after an opponent draws fans, place one of your drawn fans onto the scoring tile instead of the porta-potty

The game continues until the scoring tile is filled with fans (based on player count).  It is possible to have more fans than spaces allotted.  At that point, the game ends.  The player with the most fans on the main stage is the winner.  If there is a tie, continue taking turns until there is a clear winner.

My thoughts on the game

Well, this is the second year in a row with a game about music festivals (Come Together last year) – and this one is a light combination of trying to get your pawn onto the right space of the track while also trying to manage the composition of the fans in the bag.

If you can, trying to get an array of different ticket colors feels to be one of the keys to the game as this is how you trigger the special actions – and a well timed special action can really swing the game into your favor.

There are a limited number of scoring spots on the main stage tile (only 16 in a 4p game), so each extra one can be a huge difference maker, seeing that you’re only going to get 4 on average.  So, finding a way to get more of your fans into the bag will help – or getting to place one drawn by your opponent can be huge.

The game doesn’t last overly long – in part because the track itself is fairly short, only 31 spaces, with some movement cards allowing you to move almost a sixth of the track!  There is definitely a strategy to race to the end and then drawing more and more fans each turn from the bag, hoping to place yours onto the mainstage.  Of course, you must figure out how to get a few more of your fans in the bag than the starting three – but if you get there fast enough, you might just get enough of your own fans onto the stage before everyone else catches up.  

However, if you do this, you might lose the ability to perform special actions, and as I said, they can be invaluable.  (In this scenario, you’d probably want to have enough different tickets to get your unloved meeples out of the bathroom line at least once so that you have a chance to place them onto the scoring tile).

The graphics are functional, and for the most part work.  I do wish that the cards maybe had a bit more color to them – the all beige cards with slightly beiger numbers is… dull.  Also, and this might be a US-centric complaint; the reference card uses the standard euro abbreviation “WC” for the porta-potties; but I had to explain this a number of times when playing with some less-well-traveled Americans.  The porta-potty doesn’t have a WC icon anywhere on it, and this could have easily been placed in the corner to prevent confusion.

On the Road is a nice light game which seems well suited for the family market that Helvetiq targets.  Rules are easy to grok, quick to teach, and the game moves along nicely.  There is still a decent role for luck in the game, and for a family game, this is probably a plus as it allows for less skilled players to still compete in the game.  I have played this with my non-gaming friends and it went over quite well in that setting.

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor