Base price: $40.
2 – 5 players.
Play time: ~30 – 45 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 5
Full disclosure: A review copy of Word Traveler was provided by Office Dog Games.
Seems reasonable right before I do a ton of travel to talk about at least one game about travel. Next week is probably photography and something about either escaping a room or two or some glass, so we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. But I’m all over the place through the end of the year with board game stuff, so look forward to that. Maybe I’ll even post more on Instagram! One can dream. In the meantime, there’s always more to do; let’s do it.
In Word Traveler, you’ve managed to travel to some of the most beautiful cities in the world! You’re looking for souvenirs, but unfortunately, you don’t really speak the language. You know a few words, so you’re trying to build a pathway based on those words between different local landmarks for your co-players to solve. Each player gets their own words and their own guide as to which spaces are valuable, and so they can build their own path for a team comprised of everyone else to solve. Sounds easy? You’d better hope so if you want to get the best souvenirs and the most points! Will you manage to have the best vacation?
Contents
Player Count Differences
Not a ton in terms of gameplay; you simply distribute the golden souvenirs a bit farther out with more players (since the group can, theoretically, score more points). The nice thing is with more players, you do have an extra brain or two on the scene to help you figure things out, but also, as is the case with any bit of groupthink, you don’t necessarily know for sure if they’re actually helping you or hindering you. The thing I like about this as opposed to some other team-based games is that everyone still gets to plan their own strategy and have their own turn; it’s just once you’ve laid your clues, it’s up to everyone else to get it right. Keeps things interesting no matter the player count, so I don’t have a strong preference, here.
Strategy
- Think a few moves ahead. You’re not just thinking about where you want someone to go on one move; you’re trying to get them to trace a three (or five) stop path of your design. So you’re not just planning about where they want to go when they take their first step; you’re trying to make sure you leave the right cards available to you so that you can guide them all the way to their destination. Anything else and they will misinterpret things. That’s just how the game works.
- Consider alternative interpretations of your cards. What’s plausible and what’s likely? Try to eliminate likely misunderstandings with the full understanding that you can’t completely do so. There’s always going to be a player who misreads the card or doesn’t look closely at the image and leads everyone astray at least once when you play; you can’t try to plan for them every game. Instead, just do the best you can and hope it works out from there.
- Always assume your co-players are playing optimally where they can. Your teammates aren’t trying to be intentionally tricky and they get no benefit if you goof it or mess up the landing of it all. Trust that they’re at least trying to steer you in a useful direction and maybe take a guess based on that.
- Try to use as many of your words as you can; they’re information, after all. Don’t just throw them down where they don’t make sense, granted; you should always make sure you’re playing them with intention. Instead, try not to leave anything behind and see if you can substitute a word that you haven’t placed yet for another word you have; it might be more precisely used elsewhere, which is fine.
- If you stick to the edges and the corners, you limit your ability to move in certain directions. That can come in pretty handy. Your coplayers know you’re not moving to the right if you hit the rightmost edge, and they get to see all the directions you’re planning on moving in in advance. That means you can eliminate possible directions by staying near those edges, sometimes. That can be pretty helpful!
- Sometimes you just don’t have the cards for what you need; focus on getting as many points as possible, even if you can’t get the double-point spaces. Sometimes the path you want and the path you can make are two different paths, and that’s just gotta be okay. It doesn’t always end up the way you’d like. When that happens, focus on just finding a path that could potentially (and plausibly) earn you as many points as possible.
- It may help, before the game starts, to just establish what all the spaces are; not everyone is going to know what everything is, necessarily. Not everyone recognizes every landmark or its context! Sometimes it’s helpful to make sure everyone’s on the same page (and I usually appreciate it as well).
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- I love the theme! Travel-themed games are really hot right now; something about the pandemic getting everyone fired up to leave their house, I suppose.
- This is the kind of party-type game that’s going to engage a lot of people. People really like collaborating on what they think other people should be doing or should have done better, so folks naturally want to participate, even if they’re just Extra Guessers every round.
- Having four boards included is a blast (also, nice; you’d expect to have to pay for extras these days). Two double-sided boards is not a guarantee, so it’s nice to see that they did that here. Plus, I imagine extra boards takes a ton of design time (to say nothing of how it integrats with the cards).
- Pretty easy to expand either by way of additional word packs or with additional boards! Sky’s the limit there. There’s a lot you can do! I’d love to see a Seattle board or a various board game conventions promo board or something, and there’s always more words to use. I’m interested to know how the playtesting around words works, actually.
- I appreciate that each player gets something that’s completely theirs (their word placement) and then can team up to try and figure out their opponents’ words. It makes the game feel a bit more personal since you can completely do your own thing, and I like that.
- I appreciate the copious number of pigeons (and the justification for them!). They connect all the cities together with their weird garbage bird energy. I think that’s lovely.
- It’s also nice that they included travel guides so that you can learn more about the cities, if you’d like. It’s nice to be able to learn about things! Plus, if you’re interested in the cities, you can actually go find out.
Mehs
- It’s not entirely clear from the rules whether or not you’re allowed to flip your cards while you play. I think I’ve played both ways (though I think BGA does not allow it? I played an older version.) I’d love if it were more explicit.
Cons
- There’s a lot of explicit and implicit meaning wrapped up in different images, so it’s very useful if you go over what each picture is before you play so that everyone’s on the same page. Unlike say, Codenames, where the only thing there is words, having just images means that if a player doesn’t recognize the Louvre, for instance, they might have very different interpretations of your clue than someone who does recognize it. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s potentially helpful to root out that opportunity for miscommunication and go over all the cards. It’s the same way I read out all the Codenames cards before I start playing, really.
Overall: 8.25 / 10
Overall, I had a lot of fun with Word Traveler! I really enjoy word games, so this was almost certainly going to be a hit for me, but I was also really pleased that my various game groups liked it too! There’s something nice about the pseudo-spatial element of gameplay where you’re trying to guide your coplayers along a path, both in that you have no control over it when it goes wrong, and also in that sometimes players who venture off of your path still score or end up back on it! The world moves in mysterious ways, sometimes. Plus, it’s very clear that this is a love letter to travel games and various major cities. There’s lots of cute art, lots of supplementary information, and even pigeons to tie all the cities together with everyone’s favorite trash bird. I think it works as a companion to other word-guessing games because this one has that path element to it; I’m glad that extra spike in complexity is there. It’s something novel and all its own and completely easy to riotously mess up (three great ingredients for a fun time with a game). I’m looking forward to seeing if Office Dog does more with this in the future, but in the meantime, if you’re looking for a fun word game, you want to learn a bit more about some major cities, or you just like pigeons, you’ll probably enjoy Word Traveler! I certainly have.
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