I’m not a Backpacker, I have never been travelling.

I assume it’s a lot of taking photos and even more sitting around doing nothing?

Travel the continents of the world taking photos in different countries. Like real traveling, you will constantly be faced with choices, so you’ll need to play the right card at the right time. Visit one or many continents, enjoy bonus events, get good and bad advice, avoid getting sick or missing your plane. You may even be forced to change your plans or seek assistance from your fellow backpackers.

Backpacker Game Play

Each player gets 5 cards and in turn order players either ‘Draw a card and play a card’ or choose to ‘Go home’.

If playing, you can either play a Country, an Event or just discard a card without playing one.

Country cards are placed face-up in front of you and you can’t have more than 2 countries of the same colour (representing Continents) in your pile.

If playing an event card, it will depend on the colour of that card as to what it does and where it goes.

Blue – Bonus – Played on top played Country if the bonus symbol matches one on that country. It increases the points of that country.

Grey – Bad – Cannot be discarded so must be played to resolve its negative effect. But, you can’t ‘Go Home’ and score if you have one in your hand.

Green – Good Advice –Removes a Bad Advice card.

Red – Bad Advice – Play on an opponent’s pile if they have at least 1 country in their pile. It gives them a persistent negative effect.

Pink – Problem – Play on another player to give them a one-off negative effect.

Orange – Change – Events to manipulate your hand and the hands of the other players.

Yellow – Special – Good events that give you a bonus.

Going Home

If Going Home, you score. You can only Go Home if you have no Grey cards in your hand which, as I mentioned, need to be played first and are very negative.

You score the value on countries (and their attached bonuses) and if you have a stack of 5 different coloured countries you get a bonus of 200 points.

When the draw deck runs out, each player ‘Goes Home’ and scores what they have as normal.

Reshuffle the deck and go again. After going through the deck a pre-determined number of times the player with the most points wins.

Theme

I mean, I guess? You visit countries, take pictures and stuff goes wrong. I’ve never been travelling but I’m guessing this is how it is

Setup & Rulebook

Setup is simple…

The rulebook is AWFUL! It’s 4 sides of A4 in a tiny, tiny font that could have been less than 1 side of A4.

I guess the rulebook is written for people that never play games or something because they even go into extreme (and painful) detail on how to deal 5 cards to each player.

It also describes the ‘Draw’ and ‘Discard’ pile as the ‘Past’ a ‘Future’ pile which does make sense thematically, but only if time travel exists.

It does do a good job explaining how to add new elements of the game one at a time to increase the ‘complexity’.

Components & Artwork

Not for me, very basic. The colours are clear I guess.

The country cards have real photos of landmarks which is nice.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

It’s very easy to teach. It’s also accessible even though cards in hand are hidden, especially the base game with a lot of the Event cards removed.

Backpacker Summary

This is fairly contrived for what is a take that set collection game. But, due to its small size and relatively simple complexity, I guess it would be a good game to take travelling and play with other travellers you meet?

It was quite slow though and getting through the deck took time. Especially as some cards allow you to put discarded cards back on the deck. (Or cards from the past back into the future hence the time travel reference earlier)

Also, the grey cards not only HAVE to be played so you can ‘Go Home’ and score but look at this one, SKIP THREE TURNS!

Yawn.

So instead of Backpacker, I would prefer Pina Pirata. Something as random-ish but with a bit of control AND shorter. Also, you don’t miss a go!

Jesta Tha Rogue