Game Overview: TRAILS, or Pacing the Land for Points

On June 20, 2021, Henry Audubon's TRAILS from Keymaster Games will debut at the U.S. retail chain Target, with TRAILS being a standalone sequel to the 2019 game PARKS from the same designer/publisher team. (Keymaster has noted that the game will have wider availability later in 2021.)

TRAILS is a relatively straightforward design: On a turn, advance one or two spaces in the direction you face, then take the action shown on that space: collecting one of three resources, swapping one resource for others, or taking a photo. If you land on the space where the bear is located, the bear ~~rips your face off~~ moves to the location you roll on the bear die, then gives you the action of that space in addition to the action of the space where you moved.

When you reach the trail's end, you turn around, receive a sun bonus, move the sun toward the trailhead, then use the resources you've collected to claim merit badges. By expending your canteen, you can move any number of spaces, but you refill that canteen only at the trailhead, so at minimum you need four actions to complete a round trip, with the maximum being twelve actions.

When the sun moves off the trailhead, each player takes a final turn, then you count points from badges and photos to see who wins.

Chase that bear for extra action

More abstractly, TRAILS is a game of getting resources, then converting them to points. To get resources, you land on a space, swap for what you need (since you gain one resource with each swap), get lucky with the bear, or (possibly) use a badge as claimed badges sometimes reward you with resources or a swap in addition to points.

Resources will rain upon you steadily as you criss-cross the trail, and they may or may not be relevant for the badges available. You have one badge in hand and two at each end of the trail, giving you a mix of public and private targets to work toward. Sometimes an opponent will snipe a badge that you were hoping to claim, but the replacement badge revealed at the end of that player's turn has nearly the same cost, so whatever; at other times, you'll be left with a pocketful of useless acorns. Maybe you should have used that canteen to hop to trail's end, but perhaps doing so would have left you one acorn short because you needed to stop in the forest first. Hmm...

My holdings at the end of a three-player game

As you add more players to TRAILS, that badge you hold in your hand becomes more important since only you have access to it, giving you something to work toward that can't be claimed by another. The randomness of the badge flips adds a luck element to the game that you have to live with. You can try to squat on resources so that you can acquire a badge no matter what turns up, but you have a resource limit of eight, so when you have a badge that costs five acorns or three rocks+two leaves, you don't have room in your pouch for much else, which can lead to you feeling like you're trudging for multiple turns just to finish the thing so that you can move on to something else.

In addition to the badge in hand, the photos provide another mystery element to gameplay. When you take a photo action, you draw two cards from the deck, keep one, and discard the other; alternatively, you can claim the top card of the discard stack, but that's another person's trash, so why not take your chances on drawing two cards and keeping one since you will (almost) inevitably get something at least as good as the trash? Besides which, if you draw, then the card you collect is secret. Points from photos are revealed at game end, and whoever has seen the most birds — which are present on both photos and badges — receives a bonus 4 points.

These hidden elements — the birds and photos — keep you from calculating everything, but the pace of the game is determined by player movement, and aside from photos you have to move to the end of the trail to score, so you have only limited control over how long the game lasts. The same can be said for the bonus bear actions. If you jump ahead of others so that you can land next to the bear and roll the die, you might luck out and move the bear behind opponents so that they can't bear on their turn, or the bear might end up in the perfect spot for them to use. More generally, you can try to take actions to hinder others — swiping badges ahead of them, moving the bear out of their path — but the luck of the die and card flips might make your efforts meaningless.

The pace of badge acquisition escalates over time as the game board tiles flip when the sun moves away from them, with a space now providing two rocks, leaves, or acorns instead of only one. This allows you to move those more expensive badges to your collection, but everyone else is collecting more resources, too, which increases the difficulty of planning to collect certain badges at trail's end since they're likely to be claimed by someone else first.

For more of my thoughts on TRAILS, which I've played seven times on a review copy from Keymaster Games, check out this overview video: