The Grand Carnival: On the Road Expansion Preview

boardgamequest.com:

Note: This preview uses pre-release components and rules. What you see here may be different from the final, published game.

A year or so ago, I was walking through my FLGS and saw a copy of The Grand Carnival on the shelf. As a self-admitted amusement park theme addict, my interest was instantly piqued. While the back of the box didn’t give me much of a sense of the gameplay, I figured I’d reach out to Uproarious Games anyway to see I they had a copy of us to check out. Fast forward a few months and The Grand Carnival not only became one of my Top 10 Board Games of 2020, but ended up winning our award for the best game from a small publisher that year.

Yet despite my love of the game, it wasn’t perfect–the scoring was pretty static each game, leaving me wishing for some variety. However, game designer Rob Cramer was apparently listening because he’s back on tour with the circus in the form of the first expansion for The Grand Carnival. Dubbed: On the Road, get ready to take your traveling show on a tour of the US.

First off, if you aren’t familiar with the base game, you can read my initial review of the core game here. The On the Road is a modular expansion that adds a variety of new ways to score points in the game. All told there are seven small modules (at the time of this writing) that can either be mixed and matched or used altogether. So let’s take a look at what’s new.

Peanuts: When you buy a size 1 attraction, you also put two peanut tokens on it. After a guest visits the attraction and places a ticket on it, you collect the peanuts. On a future turn, the peanut tokens can be spent to add 1 to the action number that you are using.

Golden Tickets: When a guest ends their movement orthogonally adjacent to a