Get on Board: New York and London Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Get On Board, a flip and write board game published by IELLO. In Get On Board, players are trying to make bus line routes to get people where they need to go.

As far as big name board game designers go, Saashi may not be the most recognized around the world, but fans of his interesting and often quirky games are among the most avid I’ve encountered. Most of Saashi’s games were published in Japan under the Saashi & Saashi label. And that was where I first encountered Let’s Make a Bus Route—an interesting take on flip-and-write mechanism that had players writing on a communal dry erase board.

Get On Board is essentially the same game with a new coat of paint and some wooden sticks replacing the messy dry-erase madness. So let’s discuss how it plays and see if this IELLO-published version is worth checking out.

During setup, you’ll choose to play on the New York or London side of the map, depending on player count. Each player will get a starting location and a score sheet. Then you’ll flip up bus tickets from a deck of 12 cards that correspond to certain types of routes you can place on the central board.

Each player will have a different route shape they can place for each bus ticket, so while bus ticket #4 may be two straight lines for me, it correspond to three lines with two turns for my opponent. You must start your line from your starting space and you can never double back or branch off, only extending your single bus route. Along the way you’ll pick up and drop off passengers at each intersection, all of which score differently.

The nice elderly ladies just like riding the bus it seems, so you’ll get an increasing number of points the more of them you pick up. Students need to get to school, obviously,