Through time and space

What is your go-to gateway game? We might just have found ours! With commercial time-travel ⏱️ available, you can go and visit any year or event you’d like! This is the theme of Trekking Through History, a card drafting game in which you are going on a 3 day tour, trying to have the best scoring itinerary. 🙃

⚙️ The game structure is quite simple: on your turn you a pick a card from the open display, take it and collect every colored experience token of the card and card slot. You have 2 primary goals:

1️⃣ Make big sets of cards of ascending years - bigger sets score more points! If you take a card with an earlier date than the last card of your set, you have to close that set and start a new one.
2️⃣ Fill your travel itinerary with experience tokens. During each round of the game you get an itinerary board with different layouts and number of slots for each of the experience colors. Fill rows or columns on this with tokens for bonus points.

To take things up a notch there is also a time mechanic! ⏰ Cards you take have a cost, which moves your marker on the clock board. Instead of a normal turn structure, whoever is last on the track gets to go, which means you could chain together 2-3 turns. 👍 You can also get time crystals 💎 that can be spent to make card costs cheaper. If you don’t like the cards on offer, you can grab an Ancestor card instead, which acts as any year and gives you a wild xp token as well.

So as you play you have to juggle building big sets with also trying to efficiently fill up your itinerary. This makes the seemingly straightforward choices more layered, especially with the time mechanic. There is enjoyment to be had even as an experienced gamer! 😊

There is also an optional module that adds an additional action you can take and boosts the replayability of the game! 😁

The quality of this game definitely deserves a shoutout! Chunky plastic tokens with a removable tray, beautiful card art and a neoprene playmat! 🥰 These visuals coupled with the accessibility make this game a strong contender in the gateway category, and I think it should be particularly easy to rope new people into a game or two.