Trailblazers

• What's Eric Playing?

Base price: $15 for the Pocket Edition.
1 – 8 players.
Play time: ~30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 10 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Trailblazers was provided by Bitewing Games. I’ll be covering the game using the Deluxe Edition, but the Pocket Edition has similar components and gameplay.

Whew, we’re cooking this week. It’s a bit wild. I haven’t written four reviews in one week in a few years, and it’s only Wednesday (as of writing). If I keep this up, I might actually stop being behind and start being ahead for once. I’ll have no idea what to do with myself, just you wait and see. BGA has been helping a lot, granted, but I’ve also had some opportunities to play games in person with my friends lately that I haven’t had as much of beforehand. Turns out moving really eats a lot of your time for a while. Who’d’ve thought? Anyways, task at hand. Trailblazers!

In Trailblazers, players are carving paths through the wilderness with three different types of mobility: hiking, cycling, and kayaking! Your discovery of these trails will help future adventure-loving folks follow behind you safely, but don’t forget that you do eventually need to get back to camp or you will starve and die. Or have to do some Man vs. Wild stuff that’s outside the scope of this blog. Either one, bad times. Draft cards to place your paths, head there and back again, and complete goals to become the ultimate trailblazer! What will you discover?

Contents

Setup

Not a ton to set up. Give each player a set of player cards:

Give them one of each Camp, also:

Shuffle the Trail Cards and set them aside:

Then, shuffle the two sets of Goal Cards, revealing two of each type.

You should be ready to start!

Gameplay

A game of Trailblazers takes place over four rounds, as players draft cards to build out trails from a Hiking, Cycling, and Kayaking camp.

Kick off a round by dealing each player eight Trail Cards. Before looking at them, in the first three rounds they must place a Camp anywhere in their play area. If it’s not the first camp, it must be adjacent to an existing card of some kind (Camp / Trail). Then, players can take their Trail Cards, place two, and pass the rest left (odd-numbered rounds) or right (even-numbered rounds). At the end of each turn, if any player has completed an In-Game Goal, they place one of their player cards under the highest value that doesn’t have a player card under it. If multiple players achieve the goal in the same turn, they both put their card under the same value.

Trail Cards can be placed mostly how you want; they just need to be placed adjacent to an existing card of some kind. You can even place Trail Cards so that they overlap other Trail Cards (but not Camps). You can’t place them under other cards though. Also note that you don’t have to match Trail Types when you connect them!

Each player plays six cards, discarding the final two, and then the round ends. Deal each player eight cards again and start a new round! After four rounds, the game is over! Calculate scores by tallying up points from Goals and giving each player 1 point per segment in completed loops of each type. A completed loop starts and ends at a Camp of the corresponding color, so Hiking Loops can only start and end at the Hiking Camp. Each card is two segments long and one segment wide, so that should help with scoring. The player with the most points wins!

Player Count Differences

You won’t notice a ton in practice, probably. Since it’s a drafting game, you’ll be passing cards to other players regardless of player count. The interesting thing at two players is that you’re very likely to get the cards you passed back again (since there are fewer intervening players), so you can plan a bit for the cards you’re going to get. At higher player counts, your hand each turn is effectively random, since you haven’t seen it before (and likely will see none of those cards again). You may still notice things like contention for certain Trail types based on the goal cards, but that’s about the extent of the player interaction in the game. I like being able to strategize a bit more, so I’m somewhat more partial to the lower player counts, though I figure Trailblazers is fun with just about any player count.

Strategy

  • The single-card U-turns are great, low-scoring ways to go after goals. I use the U-turns to quickly create loops so I can swoop in and get a few points if another player is about to get the goal I want. It’s petty, but efficient, which is kind of the ideal way to score points. That said, they’re only 2 point loops, so you’ll want longer and more in-depth loops if you want to win the game.
  • Keep in mind that once you’ve scored an in-game goal, you can change your board (and even no longer meet that condition) and you won’t lose the points. Basically if a goal card gives you points for having four loops and you break one, you won’t suddenly lose the goal, which is nice. Granted, this strongly encourages players to go for goals as quickly as possible, so, you know, be snappy about it.
  • Place your Camps carefully! You only get to place each one once. Do you want to place them to optimize for loops, or are you trying to get them enclosed within another loop? Think strategically when you place.
  • Don’t forget about overlapping cards. This just happens to a lot of players, so it’s worth reiterating, to some degree. You’re allowed to place cards on top of each other to mix up the trails, which can be good! You can use this to make cards you wanted but didn’t end up drawing.
  • There’s definitely a “swing for the fences” strategy where you can try and make a giant loop. In a lot of games, if you succeed, you’ll win, but you’ll also have trouble completing that loop, since everyone can see what you’re planning. Everyone can see what you’re going for, so you might find yourself getting passed gradually fewer and fewer Kayaking Trail Cards, for instance. You can try and be subtle about it, but that’s a lot tougher.
  • You can hate-draft a little, as a treat. If you see the player to your left or right building a huge loop of some kind, try to make it harder for them to get cards of the type they need. It’s rude, but, sometimes you have to hate-draft a little in order to win.
  • Keep an eye on what other players are doing; it may influence what goals you go for, this turn. You can definitely see when players are about to achieve certain goals. If you’re close as well, you might want to get in there so you tie, rather than letting them take first place by themselves.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

  • Very fun art scheme! It’s got that unlined look that pops with a nice blend of colors, which I like a lot. It looks particularly good given that the trails are such distinctive colors, so everything on the card pops and makes the whole game easy to look at and play.
  • Worth double-mentioning but the player cards are particularly striking. They look really good! They’re all so nice that there aren’t even fights over them; there’s almost always another color that a player can pick that they’re perfectly satisfied with.
  • Plays super quickly. You’re really just playing two cards and passing. Drafting games are almost always nice for this sort of thing, since the simultaneous play takes a lot of the edge off.
  • Another nice and simple introduction to drafting. The play-and-pass gameplay isn’t something everyone is used to, but Trailblazers isn’t too complicated to learn, so this is always a nice way to teach folks. Plus, a lot of players like the theme and the art, so that’s extra points on engagement.
  • I always like route-building; it’s one of my favorite mechanics in games. I just enjoy pathing and figuring out what I need and hoping I get it. Many of my favorite games have route-building elements to them, and I’m always happy to see it pop up.
  • I think there are a number of nice “let’s go outside without going outside” games, and Trailblazers fits in quite nicely with the PARKS series. I have to trick my outdoorsy friends, and this is a great one for that. PARKS is, too, so there are a lot of good games in this theme family.
  • I like that the cards can have paths that overlap and twist and turn; it makes for a lot of fun tableaus at the end of the game. It’s just cool to see what everyone came up with given the same goals and similar(ish) cards. A real sense of accomplishment, which is something I like about route-building.
  • Lots of fun expansions, too! There are a bunch that come in the box for the deluxe game, and even more that I’ve seen on BGG, so there’s a lot of ways to keep the fun rolling if you like the core game.

Mehs

  • I do wish the cards were a bit bigger and less slippery. They kind of slide off of each other, sometimes, which can be a pain when you’re trying to overlay them nicely for photography reasons. Plus, just them being bigger would make lining the cards up a fair bit easier, though I imagine portability was a factor in the sizing.
  • The problem with real-space games is that you can often end up at a point where you need to shift everything and that’s not entirely viable. If you hit the end of the table, you can try to move your entire play area so you can keep going, but it’s not exactly going to be easy. You might want to have another player take a picture in case you need to rebuild parts of it. This is just generally a problem with games like these without a clear boundary edge of the game.

Cons

  • You’ll feel like you’ve seen all the Goal Cards pretty quickly. There are six in-game goals and six end-game goals, and that feels like a good amount to start, but you’ll kind of quickly see them all (since you use two of each per game). I would have liked to see a wider set of goals and challenges in the game.

Overall: 8.25 / 10

Overall, I think Trailblazers is a great little game! It’s been a lot of fun to mess around with and try new strategies each round, though I do kind of wish there were more variety among the Goal Cards to really ramp that up, somewhat. As it currently stands, with only six of each, you have a lot of different permutations, yes, but not necessarily a ton that make the game feel different from play to play. It’s the distinction between variety and replayability, I suppose. Thankfully, Trailblazers is fun enough that that’s not really an issue (just something I could see an expansion addressing). I like it a lot for the kind of brewery crowd where I usually will play games with an outdoorsy theme anyways, like Scram! or PARKS, things like that. Especially up here, there are a lot of outdoorsy people, so I have to kind of tamp down my indoorsy nature. It’s not that I never want to leave my house; I just would prefer to leave my house for other people’s houses. You understand. While this is meant to be a portable game and I get that, I would have loved if everything were a bit larger, just to make the cards easier to pick up and place without them occasionally sliding around. Them’s the breaks, I suppose. But Trailblazers is easy to pick up, easy to play, and easy to score, so I like it a lot as an introduction to drafting and route-building games (the latter being one of my favorite types of games to play!). If you’re looking for something like that, you want to explore the great indoors, or you just like games with a vague kayaking theme, you’ll likely enjoy Trailblazers! I think it’s a lot of fun.

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