Abroad

• Designers: Rodrigo Rego, Danilo Valente 
• Publisher: Portal Games, 1 More Time Games
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 12+
• Time: 90 mins
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4yObqLP
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

You’ve always wanted to travel the world, and now you have a chance to do it for a living! A position has opened up at the most prestigious travel guide publisher, and you have four weeks in Europe to show that you are the right person for the job. Visit stunning locations, meet locals, get insider tips, collect postcards from famous attractions, and maybe even visit a festival on weekends or fulfill an adventure worthy of a bucket list.  Europe awaits you in Abroad, and you need to figure out how you’re going to make the most of the opportunity. You’ll start with a hand of seven location cards from a deck of 240, as well as a postcard with an endgame goal. 

Set up the board by placing bucket lists and local tiles on each region.  Randomly choose two regions to get Scoring Bonus tokens.  Place festival tiles in the other 8 regions.  Shuffle the Postcards and the Locations decks.  You might have to split up the Location deck as there are 240 (!) cards in it. The First player token goes to the player who needs a vacation the most!

Each player takes a calendar board and fills each space with a face-down disc.  The four income markers start on the 0 space of the track at the top of the board.  During the game, as you increase your income, you will move these markers forward.  If they are already in the 4 space (max income), gain 2 VP instead.  Players take a starting income (4 coins, 2 Energy, 1 local and 1 Excitement).

Players get a starting hand of 7 Location cards.  The Location cards tell you what region the location is in, how many days it takes to see it as well as 1 to 4 tags on the right.  Each location has a specific action that occurs when you play the card as well as a special action that occurs if you visit the location on a specific day of the week.  Players also receive 3 postcards, of which they choose one to keep.

The game lasts four rounds, with each round consisting of seven days. Take turns in a round until you have spent all of your days. 

There are 7 phases to each week:

1] Draw Locations – each player refreshes their hand to 7 Location cards

Places that sound like other games

2] Tourist week – You can stay where you are, or travel to a new location by plane (by spending 4 coins to go anywhere) or by train (by spending 1 energy per adjacent region). Then take one of four activities:

• Write about the location – spend a day, discard 3 cards from your hand and gain 4 coins.
• Rest, spending a day and three cards to earn 2 energy.
• Plan, spending a day to draw three cards.
• Carry out an activity, spending as many days as listed on a card in your hand matching your region.  The time cost can be reduced by one day for each Excitement you spend (minimum cost is always 1 day). Resolve the location’s effect and if applicable the Weekday special effect.  

When you spend your days, transfer a disc from your calendar (going from Monday to Sunday) onto the region you are currently in.  If you get an insider tip, flip your disc on the board over to the side which shows a heart.  Also, any time that you can gain a postcard, draw 3 and choose one to keep.  Each of these cards has end-game bonus scoring options on them.

Finally, you can do up to 3 Extra actions in the region where you pawn lies:

• Local Tile – pay the cost on the left of your region’s local tile to get the benefit on the right
• Bucket List Tile – If you meet the requirements of a Bucket List tile in your current region, take the one with the most VPs on it.  You can only take one Bucket List per region
• Festival Tile – only on Saturday or Sunday, you can pay the cost on a Festival tile from your region to pick up said tile, place it in your area and then use its ongoing benefit for the rest of the game.

Your turn is now over and the next person goes.  If they have no discs left in the current week, they are simply skipped.  Continue play until all players have used all 7 discs in the current week.

3] Region Scoring – The player with the most hearts in a region scores 2 points, second most scores 1 point. If tied for hearts, total number of discs is the tiebreaker. If the region has a bonus scoring token in it, first place gets an extra point. If there is a full tie for first, both players score fully but no second place scoring is granted.

4] Refresh Festivals – Return any unclaimed festivals to the box and then place two randomly chosen festivals onto their respective region

5] Income – Each player gains 2 Coins plus whatever their income markers dictate from their position on the track.

6] Discard Locations – Players discard down to 7 Locations in hand if they have more than 7

7] Rotate First Player

After four rounds, tally your final score:

• Score all your postcards based on whether you met their primary or secondary goal
• Gain 1 point for every 4 resources left over

The player who has logged the most points as evidence of their awesome travel skills, with ties broken in favor of the player with the most combined bucket lists and festivals.

For the solo game of Abroad, you compete against a bot that always has three location cards in a row that determine where it travels next, although you spend money or energy to discard its locations and send it elsewhere.  The bot also gets all of its discs on Monday, Thursday and Sunday turned over to the heart side during setup.

My thoughts on the game

1 More Time Games has been on my radar since their first effort, Riftforce – which I first saw in preview form back in 2020.  Their next game, Challengers, is one of my all time favorite auto-battlers, and now I pretty much anticipate anything they have coming out.  Abroad was honestly one of my top 3 games to see at Spiel 2025, and I was sorely disappointed when my friends at 1 More Time told me that an English version would not be ready in time. I was thus overly joyed to see Abroad come across on the Portal Games newsletter.  It quickly became one of my most anticipated 2026 Gen Con games, and it has lived up to the hype.

In Abroad, players spend four weeks traveling across Europe, trying to see as many sights as possible, meeting locals and filling out postcards for victory points.  The system for playing a card to your calendar is simple – just be in the right region and spend the days needed to see the sights on the card.  

Places I want to go see

There is a clever system with some of the cards having extra abilities if you visit them on the right day of the week – and it’s not uncommon to plan your whole week around a particular card on a particular day.  

Speaking of planning, this is the sort of game that definitely plays out in fits and spurts.  At the start of each round, you’ll have a full hand of at least 7 cards and a bunch of resources.  For most of us here, the first turn of the week takes a bit of time because we’re actually planning out most of the week, not just that first turn.  I’ll often lay out the cards on the table, placing the coins/lightning bolts on top of them that I’ll need for travel, excitement markers to reduce the time it takes to visit, etc.   In this way, I can make sure that I’m in the right place at the right time to maximize the effects of my cards.

Sure, I might end up drawing more cards later in the week that will cause me to alter my plans; but in case that doesn’t happen, I want to be sure that I at least have a decent plan for the week.  Of course, I might also need to change plans (as there are some indirect competitions for bucket lists and festival tokens) based on what other players are doing; but those alterations can often be made in between my turns.

As each week is its own round (and you can’t roll any cards over the weekend into the next week), you’ll get four interesting logistics puzzles to try to see the best things you can in each.  You do get a bit of income between the weeks, and I’ve found that I’d prefer to prioritize increasing income in locals and excitement.  The reason for this is that you can always spend a day to gain coins or energy, but there is no easy way to get more locals or excitement.  

Of course, with this game, you’re pretty much at the mercy of the card draw here – if you don’t draw any cards that give you excitement tokens or income increases, you’ll just have to make different plans and make the best of what you get.  Also, don’t forget the advantages that you can gain from the festival bonuses – they can definitely help you maximize your month in Europe.

As you’re traveling around, you’ll leave your markers in the regions that you visit – and in between rounds, you’ll score based on a bit of area control.  It’s not straightforward as scoring rewards most hearts over most total markers – so there can be times when a single heart marker wins out over a boatload of tokens.  I’d definitely counsel players to keep their markers neatly organized in each region as the board will definitely get cluttered near the end of the game with so many things on it.

Otherwise, the bulk of scoring comes from the postcards – the end-game scoring bonus cards.  You’ll start the game with a single postcard, and you can use your opening hand to determine which one you’d like to start with – and you can mold your early strategy around it.  As the game progresses, be sure to play cards that allow you to gain more postcards as you’ll need them to compete for the win.  You always get to draw 3 postcards and choose 1, so this will even out luck of the draw to some degree.

Places I’ve been in the past 18 months

There are plenty of places to explore in the game, 240 in total, and one of the small joys for us with the game is when you get to play a card corresponding to somewhere that you’ve actually been.  This often leads to a bit of reminiscing of vacations of yore, but for me, that is an added benefit of this game. 

The game is not super fast, probably 20 to 30 minutes per player.  The logistics puzzle is NOT simple, and you’ll certainly want to take a few minutes when needed to get your plan in order.  You’ll explore the continent, see beautiful sites and hopefully learn a bit about European travel.  

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!  Dale Y
• I like it.
• Neutral.
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4yObqLP