Designed by Dan Manfredini, WizKids' Trail Story: America is set in the USA in the 1930s but tho' this period may evoke the novels of John Steinbeck there's nothing 'dust bowl' about this game or Gong Studios' evocative art. In Trail Story: America, the 2-4 players are wanderers on a trek through the American wilderness. Players will be moving between locations to pick up 'story tokens' that trigger cards with challenges on them. You'll need to meet the requirements of a challenge by managing the 'skills' on your player board and rolling successes on the custom six-sided 'inspiration' dice (0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2), in order to gain a benefit or avoid a penalty. Regardless of whether you succeed or fail, the story tokens you collect become your 'memories'.
Tho' the setting is the USA, the mechanics are distinctly euro in that Trail Story is essentially a resource management game, but it's one where you are managing the resources of skills, experience and inspiration on your player board. You need, for example, to make camp to eat and so refresh your skills. And when you camp, other players can choose to join you. They gain a benefit from doing so, but the extent of that benefit depends on the extent to which they want to share with you (ie: give you one of their story cards). Ultimately, the story cards will potentially earn you victory points but only when you've used memory tokens to commit a story card to your journal. You also earn victory points for creating 'havens' (taking a 'reflect' action, spending experience to open up more spaces on your player board and give you bonus actions at particular locations).
Trail Story: America is an easygoing game. Indeed, at first Trail Story seems super easy: its challenges mostly only require one or two successes, you have cubes in the skills section of your card and the 'inspiration' available to you to roll extra dice, and for many of the challenge cards, there's only a modest penalty for failure and often none at all. Your first couple of turns may lull you into a false sense of security, however. As you increasingly exhaust your skills and inspiration you need to manage them, using the food you'll hopefully have gained as a reward for an earlier success. But tho' things get tougher, this isn't a game like Robinson Crusoe: Adventure on the Cursed Island (Portal Games) that punishes the players: it reflects a rosy picture of wilderness adventuring and it even throws you the occasional freebie in the form of a 'hope' tile that you can flip to give you an automatic success. Nevertheless, Trail Story: America is very much a puzzle optimisation game where you're not so much dependent on lucky dice rolls as optimal balancing of your actions and resources in order to bag those end-game victory points.
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