Designed by: Daryl Chow,Saashi
Remember Our Trip is a quirky Japanese game where players collectively ‘remember’ a trip they took; scoring points for the buildings you construct in your memories – your personal board – but crucially, more points if those memories align with the shared board, which represents the actual geography of the city you went to.
It’s a relatively simple game, but a little counter-intuitive. Each round, a number of building tokens (representing restaurants, hotels, parks and so on) are drawn from a bag and made available to players to add to their own boards. A flipped Memory card tells you both how many tokens everyone can take, and also what position they can be placed in: along a row, for instance, or a column. As parts of a square. You can even build over previously-placed tokens, although you probably want to avoid that (see endgame scoring below!) This aspect is very simple – following the placement rules, you add the tokens to your board. If at the end of your turn you’ve managed to successfully group together tokens of the same type, you can flip them over and score them: each building type scores in a different way, but you can always score tokens on your own board when flipped.
After doing so, however, you look at the shared board. If there’s space to build the building you just built in the matching spots, you construct here also, using separate tiles. And you also score a point for every square on this board you cover up! Thematically, this means your memory was correct. Playfully, it means the common board is slowly filling up and opportunities to score points there decrease as the game goes on – although it’s worth noting: you can still score points by building the ‘correct’ buildings on your own board if they match buildings already built on the common board.
This continues until all the memory cards have been flipped, at which point there is some final scoring: there’s always an optional objective in the game (build X shaped buildings for instance) which is worth a chunky six points if you complete it. You score bonus points for building matching buildings on the photo spots on your board – easily spotted – and the player who discarded the most tokens loses a point per token. That’s it!
There are certainly teeth-gnashing moments in Remember Our Trip, but it's not really a nasty game at all.
Almost any game contains possibility that one player may be paralysed with indecision, but generally Remember My Trip is a leisurely-paced affair.
The challenge is to maximise points, ideally on both your own board and the shared one, and - if you really put your mind to it - put a dampener on other's plans at the same time!
There are two different cities (Singapore and Kyoto) several different objectives along with the randomness of the cards. But what makes Remember Our Trip so replayable is really the player decisions, and the tactical space the tokens give you.
2-4
Players
10+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
A slightly oddball game in what it represents and how it plays, yet it manages to be an extremely good game at the same time. A little unintuitive at first, after a play or two it becomes extremely simple, and opportunities for some spicy interaction come to the fore, with timing and turn order as critical to your progress as the tokens that come out of the bag. There's something delightful about being first player and seeing the tokens you need drawn from the bag. More likely though is the tokens you don't, with the memory card you didn't want either! Delightfully presented and alluringly more-ish, this is the kind of thing I always enjoy.