Designed by: Eilif Svensson,Kristian Amundsen Østby
Trails of Tucana is a roll-and-write style game (although here there are cards flipped instead of dice rolled) where players share a central resource – the routes on the cards – but add them to their own individual play area.
Everyone begins with a sheet of paper showing the island of Tucana (there’s a small island or a large, but everyone plays the same side as each other in a game), broken into coloured hexes: around the coast are several villages (labelled A – E) and inland, various sights to see: cats, toucans, serpents, books and obelisks. Your goal is to connect as much as you can via a network of paths: in every turn two cards are flipped over that denote which coloured hexes you can join together by drawing a path connecting them. When you connect a sight to any village by a path, you mark off points that will be scored at the end of the round. When you connect two matching sights (or three, if you are playing the large island side of the pad) you can draw a bonus path whenever you like. There are points to be had for connecting matching villages (A to A, B to B, et cetera) and bonus points for being the first to do so.
When the cards run out, that’s the end of the round and players score their sights before shuffling the deck and starting again. If you’re playing the small island, you run through the deck twice; with the large island it’s three times. The player with the most points after the final round is the winner!
None, other than missing out on the bonus for being first to connect villages.
You're not waiting for your turn because everyone takes turns simultaneously. But you may have to wait for someone to make the odd decision about where to draw.
Very light - it's about making paths and trying to connect things. It's absolutely not devoid of decisions though, and offers multiple moments of satisfaction (and frustration!)
Tucana's cards always come up in a different order and everyone's villages are set up slightly differently. So there's elements of variety in each play, even if the overall flavour remains the same.
1-8
Players
6+
Years
5-15
Mins
Sam says
I feel the best roll-and-write (or flip-and-write) games for me have an inherent simplicity to them that leads to tension and laughter. While I'd never describe Trails of Tucana as funny, it certainly qualifies as simple (and therefore accessible) and has a tangible tension to it as everyone pleads for the combination paths they desperately need to come up as time slowly - or quickly - runs out. There's something almost incongruously satisfying about making the connections you need to and grabbing a big bonus for building a path all the way across the board. Is it the best game ever? It's not even the best roll-and-write ever. But it's fun, and does exactly what it sets out to do.