Trail Story: America is a choose your own adventure type game of trekking through the 1930s in the American wilderness. You will be choosing between friends, enemies, animals, and mysteries to explore and decide how you would like to handle them, each one will be adding memories for your character, but when being successful you will also gain rewards. Trail Story is for 2-4 players, plays in about 2 hours, and is recommended for players aged 10 and up. The game is designed by Dan Manfredini and published by Wizkids. Dan reported back from Gen Con 2024, but we have also reviewed Princes of Florence, Blob Party, Yosemite, and Marvel Remix.
What’s in the Box?
- 4 Player Placards
- 1 Large Board
- 2 Small boards
- 80 Story Cards
- 4 Dice
- 8 Trinket Tokens
- 40 Story Tokens
- 24 Food Tokens
- 4 Wanderer Pawns
- 4 Hope Markers
- 72 Skill/Experience Cubes
- 9 Despair Cards
- 24 Trinket Cards
- 24 Ability Cards
- 6 Campsite Cards
- 4 Journals
- 24 Inspiration Crystals
- 52 Wanderlust Tokens
- 1 Scorepad
- 4 Reference Cards
- 1 Story Token Bag
How’s It Play?
It’s the 1930s and you and your fellow players are wanderers who are exploring rural America. The focus of this game is making stories, gathering those story cards and using your story tokens to record those stories in your journal. Throughout the game there are ways to gain points here and there, so its not just the story cards in your journal at the end of the game, but that’s a bigger piece of it.
On your turn, you will take one action of five possible actions. You can scout, which adds story tokens onto the borders between your current position and the other spaces adjacent to it. Story tokens can be explorer and triggered when taking the traveling action, but scout places more of them on, and will give you experience for each one you draw. Experience will be used to reflect another action I will later explain.
When traveling you will move the number of spaces allowed by your current stats, you can upgrade this to move further with time. After moving you will choose one story token to engage with. You flip over the matching card and you will have some choices. You will use your skills, that include intelligence, strength and agility to perform actions, and placing those cubes on those skills into the experience along side of it. The number of cubes you use of that skill will give you 1 die each to roll, and moving inspiration crystals will give you each another die. You will roll the dice and you will need to roll at least the number of stars matching the story token you are engaging with. If you succeed you gain the shown reward, if you fail you gain the failure reward. In any case, you will gain that story card and story token.
Camping is a way to reset your skills. When taking this action you will flip over a campsite card. Some will give you added benefits, but you also can eat which will let you return nuts and berry tokens, fish, or meat tokens to gain skills and restore inspiration. All other players can decide if they are within the shown distance, to join that player and potentially give up a story card to gain benefits shown on the card.
Reflecting is a way to use your experience to either find a haven or to find inspiration. You can return 3 experience from the same row to take one of the wanderlust tokens off of the row and place it on your space on the board. This will open up space for either more skills or to hold onto more tokens of a certain type. Adding these wanderlust tokens on the board will give you end game points, and clearing off tokens of a certain type can give you additional points if you have a story card in your journal that gives that goal. If you remove 4 experience from any row you can find inspiration if you are on a space that allows inspiration. This will give you another way to use inspiration as you play the game, which adds dice to your rolls.
Lastly, the journal action lets you exchange story tokens in to place story cards under your journal to score points. Each card itself score you a point each, but each card also has a listed goal to score additional points. The first journaling will cost you story tokens with 2 total stars on them, and each one after will require 4 stars to place that card in your journal.
Once 2 players have 4 journaled story cards, or 1 player has 5 journaled story cards, or all spaces on the board have havens on them, the game ends. Players will score points for each haven, for the total number of wanderlust tokens on the board, for each journaled card, for scoring bonuses listed on each of those cards, for each trinket or item ,and you will exchange your skills, experience, and unused inspiration for some points. Some despair cards can modify scoring as well. The player with the most points wins the game.
The Verdict
I’m still blown away as to how there is so much game with so little components. This game creates enough stories that it feels personal. When flipping over cards, there is something exciting as you can be somewhat prepared with skills, but there is also a part of the game where its exciting to see what you get to engage with. The added rewards can also help you know what next action to take, but if nothing else, and if you are ready you will want to explore more and flip over another story card.
This is one of those games where you will start in a certain direction, but the stories and things you interact with will guide to on to a new path, maybe a path you were not planning on taking at the beginning of the game. This might be going after certain ways to gain end gam points from your journaled story cards, or by placing more and more wanderlust tokens onto the board. Whatever you start with, doesn’t mean that is the plan throughout the entire game.
The best thing about this game is the stories and feeling like you just accomplish something big. Like unlocking a mystery that had been troubling people for years, or wrestling a bear with your bare hands, or exploring a random cave to see what was inside. All of these things can happen in this game, and its fun to have these stories, then also be successful at performing them. But just remember you will most likely be picking what you will do according to what rewards you might gain or what potentially will happen if you fail. Is a certain card worth it? Do you want to ply it say because that reward isn’t too great for you? Whatever you figure out, you will be making the decisions to go for it or not.
I just hope after looking at the name of this game, Trail Story: America, that there is more Trail Story games to come. Whatever about Australia in the 1930s? Or Europe? I would love to see more Trail Story games coming out that include fun stories, and a great way to mechanically achieve a build up of getting stronger, smarter, and faster, while also gaining more and more stuff.
Images via WizKids
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