Trail Story: America Review

boardgamequest.com:

Prior to Gen Con 2024, the BGQ staff put together a list of our most anticipated games that would be available at the con. After scouring the list, I chose Trail Story: America. I like games that leave players free to explore and make discoveries, with a narrative emerging organically as they do so, and this game seemed to offer just that.

In Trail Story: America players are wanderers trekking across the wilderness of 1930s America. The game is for 2-4 players and lasts 90-120 minutes.

The game board is made up of a square grid with each square representing one of four terrain types: mountain, river, forest, and meadow. During setup, several story tokens are drawn from a bag and placed on marked borders between these locations. There are four different types of story tokens, and each will have 1-3 stars on it, indicating that encounter’s difficulty level.

Additionally, each player has their own player board, which is where they track their skills: intelligence, strength, and agility, as well as store memories (gained from encounters), collected items such as food, and inspiration crystals.

On a player’s turn they take one of the five possible actions:

The game continues, with players taking one of the above actions each turn. Once the game end is triggered, each player takes one more turn, then points are tallied to determine the winner.

Trail Story lived up to my expectations of a narrative game with an emergent story. It’s fun to see how the cards interact with each other, and how one card sometimes leads to another, such as when I drew a card called “Rustling Leaves” which led to drawing another card and discovering a deer. I could have pursued the deer for food, but chose instead to pet it.

When you join another player’s campsite you can “share stories” by giving them one of your story cards. It’s fun to imagine sitting around a campfire talking about that time you met a carnival worker at a traveling circus who taught you to brawl. When you learn from a