Let’s Go! To France

• Designer: Josh Wood
• Publisher: AEG
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

You are travelers planning and experiencing your own dream vacations to France. Explore Paris, soaking up art, history, and delicious food through its many tourist attractions and hidden gems. Using over 100 beautifully illustrated cards, you will discover activities and strategically place them to create your six day itinerary. While puzzling out your optimal activities, you will plan your trip to one of four marvelous regions of France. Will you bask in the sun along the French Riviera or explore the historic castles of the Loire valley?

Play competitively or solo, earning victory points by successfully balancing the two halves of your vacation, making the most out of your interests, and managing your time well. The most points wins, but everyone has the chance to create a memorable vacation. 

To set up, choose one of the two Regional boards to play this game with the desired side face up.  Place a random single-flag goal tile on the board as well as a double-flag tile that matches the board.  Each player gets their own board and places the energy marker at the starting midpoint hex.  The Circular experience tokens are all placed on the leftmost zero space, and a set of square Favorable Condition tokens are randomized to the spaces for each day of the week on the player board.  

Shuffle the huge deck of 124 travel cards and place it near the board. Across the top, these cards have experience icons, a possible bonus action and a point value. Just below that is an amount of time that will be needed to play the card.  Lots of flavor art and text in the middle and then a scoring rubric at the bottom of the card.

The game is played over 14 rounds, and at the start of each round, you will draw some cards and then play and pass cards based on the icon on the round tracker.  

When you play cards, you play them to your itinerary – with each day having a max capacity of 5 cards. As you play additional cards to a day, you either play them on top of all other cards – thus becoming the bottommost card – or you tuck them anywhere else in the stack.  However, once you have placed it, you cannot move it later.  If your card has bonus actions, you take them immediately, either gaining Research Tokens or taking immediate Travel action(s) on the Regional map.

The first time you travel, you place your Traveler on any dashed square starting space and take the bonus shown on that space.  On later travel actions, you can move via any solid path to the next city and take its bonus.  If the city has a small circle near it, you place a marker here on your first visit to that city – you can only ever have the bonus of that city once.  If you reach a space with the goal icon in it, you immediately get the goal bonus that was dealt out at the start of the game.  Other cities can be revisited and you still get their bonus.  There are also some dashed lines on the map, and these can be traveled at any time if you pay the cost noted along the path.  

The icons in the upper left show you which experience tokens will move forward in the final round (when you actually get to go through your journey). The bonus at the bottom section is in play if it is visible – that is if it is the bottommost card in that column at the end of the game.  Don’t forget that you can always play a card facedown to Explore the City – it is worth a flat one point, and is worth a flat 5VP for its Highlight of the Day bonus if it is the bottom-most card.

Also check to see if you have met the favorable condition bonus token at the top of the column.  If you have done so, you can choose to do one of two things: 1) flip the token over to the “2” side, or 2) move the token to the leftmost open space of one of the 3 bonus rows at the top of the player board and take the bonus that you cover.  At the end of the game, you will get a 2VP bonus for each tile on the “2” side in your bonus row.

At any point in your turn, you can play a Research Token to immediately draw 3 cards and then discard three cards.  If you choose not to use a Research Token, it is worth 1 VP at the end of the game.  

After players have played their card(s) – and that can be done simultaneously – players now pass the remaining cards to their neighbor; going left for rounds 1-7 and then right for rounds 8 -14.  Cards that are passed to you cannot be looked at until you are instructed to pick them up at the start of a later round.

Continue the game following the pattern shown on the round tracker.  After the final round, players now score and activate their cards, going from Monday thru Saturday, doing the cards from top to bottom in each column.  There are four stages to each day:

1] Experience Track – for each Experience icon on the top of a card in the column, move the associated token one space forward.  If you exceed 10, flip the token over and start the track again.

2] Highlight of the Day – Gain any bonuses as shown in the Highlight of the Day area on the bottom-most card in the column. 

3] Points – Add up the points shown on all cards in the upper right corner.  Also figure out your Highlight of the Day scoring.  When you do this, you can use any icons and cards which have been activated up to that time.  Write the sum of these numbers on the scoresheet.

4] Time and Energy – count up the amount of time on the cards for that day and then move the Energy tracker to the left or right based on the number of hours used.  Score points (or take a penalty) based on the location of the marker at the end of the day. 

Complete this process for all six days of your trip.  Then you score for the position of each of your experience markers based on the markings on the track. Don’t forget to score 10 VPs for the first 10 experience if your marker has been flipped over to the “10” side.

Players now get 2VP for each Favorable Condition marker on the “2” side that was moved to the top of the player board.  Also, record scores for the two goals if achieved.  Finally leftover Research tokens and VP tokens gained along the way are worth 1VP each.

Sum all the scores, and the player with the most points wins.  Ties could be broken in favor of the player with the higher score for the Experience Track.

My thoughts on the game

Let’s Go! To France is the sequel to one of my favorite 2024 games, Let’s Go! To Japan.  The original game was inspired by the designer’s planning for a trip to Japan (which was nerfed by the global Coronavirus pandemic).  As you play that game, you also get to experience the joy of planning a trip to two major Japanese cities, and you can anticipate all the things you’ll get to do, eat and see on that trip.

This new game is apparently based upon an actual trip that the designer was able to take.  Again you will use a humongous deck of cards to plot out your trip, but it’s a bit more robust in its gaming mechanisms.  You now have a time element to consider for each day, and the cumulative effect of your travels can definitely impact your final score.

The additional countryside travel map and the bonus tracks give players a way to fine tune their strategies a bit.  The four different travel maps as well as the changeable goal tiles mean that players will generally have to adapt their strategies each game to the particular goals on offer.

I very much like the method used here of getting and distributing the cards.  Each turn, you’ll get at least some  choice from the cards in your hand, and then you’ll have to figure out which cards work best for you.  You also should at least passively keep in mind what cards you are passing to your neighbor – as if you are stuck between two equal cards for yourself, you might as well keep the one that they would prefer.

The favorable condition bonus token still motivates you to play those matching icons to the associated daily column – but now the players have an interesting decision of taking an immediate bonus (from three different possible tracks) or flipping the tile over and then having to match said icon again later in the game to then gain the bonus and the 2VP reward for the flipped token.

I’m still on the fence about the travel map.  In one sense, it does give players a few different options of how to move about the country, though in most of our games thus far – almost everyone has made it to all the places they wanted to go (and had access to both of the goals).  It remains to be seen how viable it might be to not take the cards nor bonuses with travel and instead try to concentrate on points from the cards on the player board.  At the moment, the travel map adds some complexity without much apparent differentiation.

The cards in this game (As with Japan) remain a complete joy to me.  I love the artistic representation of the different sites and foods of France.  I do feel like I’m taking a bit of a trip each time that I play, and I enjoy the recommended plan of retelling the story of my vacation as I score each day.

At least one of the gamers I played with remarked that this game felt a lot less like planning a trip than Let’s Go! To Japan did.  I think that is true.  But I also think that this one gives a lot more boardgame elements to consider.  Which is better?  Honestly, I think a lot depends on my mood.  For now, both games will keep a slot on my gaming shelves as I can easily see myself grabbing either of these when I’m in the mood for a game to transport me mentally on a vacation.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Dale Y, Steph H
• I like it. 
• Neutral. John P
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: