Disclaimer: A copy of Trekking Through History was provided by Underdog Games for review purposes
Introduction
I have a trick when it comes to introducing people to hobby board games. I find the easiest, most colourful, aesthetically pleasing game with a theme that they already enjoy, and use it to ease them into the hobby. Underdog Games has been producing some very bright and vibrant games with absolutely no expense spared on the production. Neoprene mats, tarot sized cards featuring full sized art, and chunky components make for excellent introductions into board gaming. Add in an educational twist, and suddenly you’ve got a game for both parents and kids to enjoy!
How to Play
In Trekking Through History, you’re playing as time travelling tourists tearing the fabric of the space-time continuum in an effort to curate the most enriching three day vacation through mankind’s past.
Setting up the game tasks players with laying out the neoprene mat that serves as the market row and score tracker, then separate the three decks of cards based on the number in the upper right corner. Each card depicts an event in history, and prominently displays the date the event happened in the top left corner. In the bottom right corner, cards may show several symbols that you’ll earn if you choose to that the card into your Trek, while the bottom left corner tells you just how much time you’ll have to spend for that card.
On your turn, you simply take one of the cards from the row, and collect tokens matching the symbols on the card, as well as a token matching the space the card was on. The tokens fall onto your itinerary and may score you points or earn you time crystals. You move your token on the time track, and place your card into your Trek. A trek is a line of cards with an ascending date, which means if you take a historical event that happens further in the past than top card of your current trek, you’ll need to start a whole new trek (It’s also worth mentioning that you can only have one active trek at a time). Then, the player whose token is furthest back on the time track, gets to take the next turn.
The rounds ends when all players time tracker tokens reach the 12 o’clock spot. The cards in the market are wiped out, and the round 2 cards come in, which span from the earliest records of BCE, all the way to almost modern day events. After the third round, the scores are counted. Your final score is based on the points you earned during play, and each of your treks are scored based on how long they are. There’s a helpful reminder on the right side of the score track. The player with most points wins!
Review
Starting off with the physical production of Trekking Through History, the components are fantastic. All the tokens you’re collecting to fill your itinerary are made of moulded plastic, and are stored in a firm, plastic case. The player markers are large, chunky plastic stopwatches that move around the circular time board, and the main play area that contains the card river and score track is a stitched edge neoprene mat. Each of the large cards feature unique and vibrant artwork. All of this to say, the components of Trekking Through History make the game feel like a premium product!
The gameplay itself is very straightforward, pick a card, pay it’s time cost, and place it into your current trek. You’ll be compelled to wait for a card to slide along the card river, so it matches up with the bonus token that you really want, so you can earn bonuses from your itinerary. This is risky, however, as you really need to hope that other players won’t snap up your card. Treks can only move forward through time, meaning if the token you really want is associated with a card late in the timeline, you may find yourself making several shorter treks, and hoping you make up the difference in points. It’s quite satisfying when everything works out, however. There are great moments during the game where the perfect card slides into the right position, and claiming that event just so happens to trigger extra bonuses on your itinerary, rocketing your marker up the score track. When the combos hit, the game sings.
I love the time mechanic, I’ve loved the mechanic in every game I’ve played that featured it (Glen More, Patchwork, and Thebes are the games that come to mind). The cards that offer you a variety of resources, and sit further back in time require more opportunity cost to acquire, which offers an excellent trade-off. It can be frustrating when you have to take a card that launches you several spaces into the lead, then you sit there, watching the other players take turn after turn, letting the card you want slip right past the resource you needed, but the flip side is quite satisfying. If you happen to have them, the time crystals allow you to reduce the time cost when acquiring a card by 1 space per crystal you spend. We found ourselves using these to get multiple turns in a row more often than perhaps we should have, but it gave us greater control over that card market. Which in a game with narrow margins, every extra point counts!
Every card represents an event in history, and the back of the card shares some details about that event. Just like in HerStory, also by UnderDog Games, this feature educated us during our downtime of the game. Events or objects I’ve never really considered, like “Breaking the Sound Barrier with Chuck Yeager”, or “Race in the Paris-Rouen” were suddenly interesting. While waiting for my turn to come back around, I felt compelled to flip over the card. Even better were the conversations some of the cards inspired amongst my friends, like watching Freddy Mercury during the 1985 Live Aid concert. I love when a game helps pull the stories from our past, or encourages us to talk about hobbies other than the game we’re currently engaged it. It’s an easy way to introduce someone to stories from other cultures they may never have encountered otherwise.
With only 36 time to spend each game, and most cards costing between 2 – 4 time, Trekking Through History moves along quickly. Before you know it, you’ve picked up 13 cards between your three treks, and the end of the game is bearing down on you. There’s a lot of luck in the cards, considering only 6 cards are available to you when it is your turn. It can be entirely possible that there just aren’t any cards that will generate the resource you need! I don’t think Trekking Through History is the absolute best drafting or set collection game out there, but it’s one that would absolutely excel in a family setting. I wouldn’t hesitate to plop this down on a week night to encourage curiosity from the younger people in my life.
The deck of cards is thick, meaning players will always be seeing new events. The game flow is easy to follow, and it feels good when the luck just happens to fall the right way. It’s a fun and smooth game, and with the dates on the cards making each card valuable or worthless depending on the state of your current trek, it’s hard to inflict bad feelings via hate drafting. With short and long term goals pulling you in multiple directions, I felt engaged through my plays of Trekking Through History, and I really enjoyed the snippets of knowledge I acquired in between my turns. It’s attractive, fun, and quick to play. It’s probably not one that I’ll be pulling out with my regular game group often, but it’s the kind of game that I would put in front of my sister and her kids when they ask “What’s the board gaming thing you’re always going on about?”
Full Disclosure – A copy of HerStory was provided by Underdog Games for review purposes
Introduction
March is Women’s History Month, and to celebrate both the month, and the 19th Amendment (granting women the right to vote in the USA), Underdog Games is selling their recently released board game HerStory, for $19.19 (US only, sorry fellow non-Americans).
I don’t know if it’s just me, but as soon as a game is billed as educational doubts creep into my mind. I blame the poorly made educational games I played as a kid in the mid 90’s (I have the same gut reaction to movie tie-in games too). HerStory is educational in that all the cards represent real women throughout history, and includes a small paragraph of what makes them notable.
How to Play
HerStory, designed by Nick Bently, Emerson Matsuuchi, and Danielle Reynolds is a 2 – 5 player set collection and card drafting game. In HerStory, players are authors and spend their turns researching, drafting, and completing chapters of a book chronicling the stories of remarkable women of History
On your turn, you take one of the three actions. When you research, you take a token depicting aspects of your research (reading, thinking, interviewing, and searching) from the main board and place it into your supply. When drafting a chapter of your book, you take a chapter card from the main board, and slot it into one of the two open spaces on your desk, reserving it for yourself, and scoring 2 points. The final action in the game is to complete a chapter, where you select a chapter card, either one you reserved previously, or, from the main board, and discard research tokens to fulfill the requirements of the chapter. Then you slot the completed chapter onto it’s space on your board and score the points in the top left corner (and earning 3 bonus points if you managed to fulfill the recipe exactly). Many characters have persistent research tokens that you can now use to finish future chapters.
HerStory ends when someone completes their 8th chapter. Players finish the round, ensuring that all players had an equal number of turns, then the player with the highest score is the winner.
Review
It’s been a long time since a “how to play” section was pretty much a single paragraph. HerStory defies expectations. The box is much larger than necessary, but the cover is striking. My partner was actually the one to receive the package from the courier, and she remarked that she loved HerStory‘s cover. It was the kind of game that if she saw it on a shelf at a store, she would stop in her tracks and pick it up.
The cover depicts 16 of the 120 women featured in the game, with wonderful portrait illustrations by Eunice Adeyi and Cristina Aguirre. Some gold foil on the cover surrounding the title is striking. Opening the box, the first thing I saw was an envelope with some special gifts. Postcards, bookmarks, and stickers to keep these influential women prominent in our lives. The game itself is composed of a monogrammed bag of thick tokens, a large, stitched edge neoprene mat to serve as the main board, 5 chunky pushpin score markers, and 120 large sized cards, each one depicting an illustration of a different woman on one side, and a short blub of who they were and what makes them notable on the back.
No expense was spared in this production. The cards and the rule book have a luxury linen finish, the cardboard chits are very thick and feel sturdy in your fingers. I’m not a fan of the faux leather monogrammed bag, I’ve never liked the way faux leather feels on my fingers, but it’s sized correctly; there isn’t a lot of empty space in that bag. The plastic insert is well-designed, in that it was successful as keeping all the components in their appropriate wells, even when the box is stored on its side, a feat not all game inserts manage to achieve.
I will say the box for HerStory is much bigger than necessary, each of the card wells in the insert has space for hundreds of more cards. I suspect this extra space is so Underdog Games can release expansion packs, highlighting even more women in the future. Assuming they continue to support this game in the future, the box might fill up, but at the time of this writing, it’s a bit bare. Some part of me always wants a game box to be as small as possible, but I can’t deny that HerStory is striking, and part of that comes from the full size box demanding space on the shelf, and showcasing its gorgeous illustrations.
I like the theme of writing a novel about women in history, having each player spend several turns researching to acquire the knowledge to write a chapter feels clever. Taking tokens that represent interviewing, reading, and thinking about each of the figures feels important, in that it’s important to put in the proper research when writing about famous people, especially in a world rife with misinformation. When you finish the game and collect all your chapters together behind the book cover that is on the back of your player aid, you feel like you’re holding something you’ve built. It seems a bit silly in that they’re only the cards you collected, but they represent the effort you spent on researching and learning about each figure. The rulebook suggests that at the end of the game, each player selects one of their cards, and reads the biography to the table.
The core gameplay loop is incredibly simple. You’re either ‘researching’ to take a token, or, spending those tokens to complete a card. There’s not a lot of space for strategic depth here, once you’ve played through a handful of turns, you’ll have tried everything available to you. From that point on, it’s just repeating the same core loop and trying to optimize based on the cards that are available to you. Some cards will offer powers that you can use all game, like persistent research icons, while others give you benefits throughout the game (like Wangari Maathai, who earns you extra points for completing lower valued chapters), and others are simply high valued cards, like the 8 point powerhouse that is Joyce Chen.
Many of the cards have special abilities, but the ones I wish I saw more of were the powers that offer persistent research symbols. In one game I got 2 different persistent benefits cards, then I was able to start completing cards by only spending a single token, leaving my opponents in the dust. My 8 cards to their 5 felt like a momentum that couldn’t be overcome. The variety of the cards is deep, in that there are 120 cards and in a 2 player game you’ll only see around 25 cards per game. I kind of wish that every card offered a single persistent benefit in addition to their text power, as that would help give the feeling of momentum as the game wears on. At the start of the game, spending 3 or 4 turns just getting tokens, then another turn to earn a single card is fine, then at the end of the game being able to complete chapters with a single token felt great, and I wish all players could experience that satisfaction.
Some will be disappointed with HerStory because of just how simple it is to play. But I think its simplicity is a strength, in that HerStory is incredibly accessible. Anyone can play this game, and it’s the kind of game that many people should play. The turns are fast and smooth, downtime is minimal, the components feel nice to hold. More importantly, it’s great for highlighting and teaching about influential women throughout history. Showcasing the great things these women have accomplished despite the barriers of being a woman is inspirational, and the kind of product that I want in my house. Frequently I would complete a chapter, place the card on my player board, then think to myself “Who even is Golda Meir?” I liked having the option to just turn the card over to discover what made her notable (She was the first and, so far, only female Prime Minister of Israel).
In conclusion, I want you to ask yourself, “what is the purpose of this game for me?” If you’re looking for a complex board game with lots of interlocking mechanisms, and a deep strategic well to plumb, HerStory isn’t going to fulfill that need for you. If you’re looking for an attractive, easy to play game full of inspirational figures that will simultaneously provide you with an activity to engage with, and teach you about some of the accomplishments of women throughout history, then I can’t recommend HerStory enough. I want my little girl growing up knowing there’s nothing she can’t do, and exposing her to the stories of strong, female role models is a great way to start.
