The Amazing Journey

• Designers: Lorenzo Silva, Hjalmar Hach 
• Publisher: Horrible Guild
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 60 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

The Amazing Journey is a globe-trotting game for 2 to 4 travelers. Check which transport vehicles are available in each date, then plan accordingly to make sure you can keep on moving without losing time. Gather Experiences to have an amazing story to tell back home and meet other players at checkpoints: the destination is as important as the memories you made along the way! 

To start, choose whether you’re going to play on the regular or the fast side of the board.  Each player gets a travel board and one of the travelers (Each with their own special action).  Players place their pawn on Day 0 of the timeline track – there are 80 days on the timeline and each day has a notation showing what sorts of transport leave on that day.  In each of the 7 locations, the 10 tokens are randomly placed face down, and then some are removed from the board based on player count before the remainder are revealed.  The three checkpoints for the game are chosen. 

Finally, each player starts with 2 Objective cards and a number of Ticket cards based on starting player order.  Players all place their mover on the start city, and all have the same goal to circle the globe, stopping at both intermediate checkpoints, and returning to the start city in 80 days.

Play goes clockwise around the table, and on any given turn, the active player must at least 2 actions AND be furthest ahead on the time track (or tied for furthest).  The action options include: Travel, Explore, Wait, Use your Traveler’s unique power.

Travel – there are a number of different options

• Timeline travel – if a transportation type leaves on the timeline day where your pawn is, you can travel along a route of that type for the cost of 2 days plus any extra shown on the route itself.  You can travel through multiple cities, but you must stop if you encounter a city that is a Checkpoint or a Location.
• Ticket travel – discard a ticket to travel on the shown type of transportation for the cost of 1 day.
• Wild ticket travel – discard any 2 tickets to travel on any type of transportation. The cost is still 1 day
• Secret travel – These routes have no Timeline departures, but can only be taken using Tickets or Traveler powers.  If you use your Traveler power, you cannot use it again until you reach a Checkpoint

Explore – If you are in a city with a Location token, you can collect it. To do so, roll the Exploration die to tell you the time and ticket cost of the action.  Place the collected Experience or Souvenir token on the appropriate spot on your player board.  As you collect Experience tokens, you can play an Objective card from your hand with a matching token to score an additional Victory Point.  If so, immediately draw another one from the deck.

Wait – if you want to stay in the same place and wait for a different day to travel… You can wait for 1 day (Refresh) and may choose to discard your Objectives and draw new ones.  Alternatively, you can wait for 2 days (Plan) and draw a Ticket.

As you go around the board, you must stop at the two Checkpoints (in order).  The time track specifies Activation days for each checkpoint – you cannot get credit for the Checkpoint until the Activation date.  You do get a VP bonus for reaching the checkpoint on an earlier day.

Once you reach the third checkpoint, you lay your Timeline pawn on its side at its current position.  This pawn is no longer considered when determining being furthest forward on the track.  The game ends when all players have reached the third checkpoint and then players calculate their score:

• -1VP for each day past 80 it took to travel
• Region scoring: 2VP per each of the 7 Regions that you have a Location Token from
• Experience Tokens – score 1/3/9 VP for each type for 1/2/3 tokens
• Souvenir Tokens – score 0-3 VP as printed on the token plus 1/3/6 VP bonus completed rows on your board
• Point Tokens – score for tokens collected during the game
• Objectives – 1VP per Objective card played

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player that took the fewest days to travel 

My thoughts on the game

Well, travel themed games are definitely a thing this year – this is the fourth or fifth game with such a theme to hit the tables here this fall. From the initial pitch, this game looked like it wanted to be another “Around the World in 80 Days” given the time track around the edge of the board and the goal to circumnavigate the globe.

However, instead of being a race against time, trying to make it to the goal before the time runs out – The Amazing Journey is actually more of the opposite.  The structure of the game actually forces you to dawdle and explore as you go – you need to stop and look around if you’re going to collect any of the things that score you points!  In fact, I did try to set up the game to see how fast I could get across the globe with a standard setup, and I made it in 26 days!    As the goal of the game is to score the most points AND not to finish as fast as possible, you can see that there is plenty of room for tourism on your trip!  

Heck, the game is even set up with delays on when the checkpoints are even open.  You have to wait until day 20 at the earliest to get to that first checkpoint.  If you get there early enough, you’ll get the maximum 3 VP bonus – but I no longer stress too much about getting to a checkpoint as soon as possible.  Many tokens are worth 2, 3 or more points and it’s likely more valuable to take a detour to get a token rather than trying to always make a checkpoint at the earliest possible moment.  (Yes, I know that I could go back for a token after the checkpoint, but you’ll also have to factor in the fact that the opponents could also pick it up in the meantime).

The big puzzle in The Amazing Journey is a logistics one – you’re racing to get to particular cities to collect tokens along the varied types of transportation.  The fly in this particular ointment is that the time track determines which transportation types move on any given day.  Further, and I think this is a blessing, you really can’t plan too far ahead because each exploration involves a die roll which results in a 2 to 4 day cost – meaning, after any exploration, you’re never really certain what day you’re going to be on.  

I’ve found that this short circuits most AP issues because you simply can’t look any further than your next exploration.  Or at least, that’s what I’m going to try to explain to my AP friends so that they don’t agonize over things.  You essentially have to wait until you figure out what day you are on when it’s time to leave and then plan on how you’re getting to the next place.  Who knows – you might end up going somewhere different based on the transportation available to you at the time.

Tickets are a key part of the strategy as they give you a lot of flexibility in planning.  Not only do they allow you to move for a cost of a single day; they can be used on any day on the time track – so you really can get out of a sticky situation with the right ticket.  If you don’t have tickets, then you’re either just waiting around for the right day to get out of Dodge (though you can use that time to generate tickets for later use).

There really isn’t any player interaction other than the inherent race to collect tokens for the set collection game on the player boards – which is definitely my cup of tea. The game has an interesting pacing because turn order always goes clockwise around the table, but the player has to continue taking actions until they get to the front of the line on the time track.  While this generally means no more than 2 or 3 actions in a row – there have been occasions where a player has taken 4 or 5 actions to get to the front.

So, for the travel games of Spiel 2027, this is the one that has the least “feel” of travel.  Unlike Abroad or Postcards which use photos/art of the actual places, this is more abstract.  I don’t feel like I’m going places in this game but rather working out how to get to places.  It’s a puzzle that I enjoy, and one that I will come back to in the future.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

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