Very, very early impressions of the Wayfarer

 This is a very, very early impression of The Wayfarer. That’s because I’ve only been playing the Poland map (which I assume is the base game because it’s used as the example in the basic rules) and there are eleven more maps (most of which have additional rules) plus two expansions.

It’s a Print-and-Play Roll-and-Write about traveling across the world and recording the memories of your journey. In actually, it’s a solitaire area of control game that is abstract to the point where the theme isn’t really a part of gameplay.

Each map is a hex grid of the country or state or island and each hex is one of six different kinds of terrain. (The percentage of each type of terrain varies, depending on the map)  Oh and each hex has a die face on it. There are also small groups of some of the hexes surrounded by dotted lines.

The core mechanic is simple. Roll four dice. Pick three. You can cross out three hexes that match those dice but they have to be part of the same line of hexes. They don’t have to be next to each other, they just have to be on the same line. Do that twenty times and figure out your score.

On the three base maps (Poland, Spain and Switzerland), there are two ways to score points. Filling in the groups within the dotted lines and getting points for each type of terrain. The scoring for terrain types starts off in the negative (with having negative twenty five of you have none of a type) so I _think_ diversification is a good idea.

When I first looked at Wayfarer, I thought ‘that’s it?’ Not only did it seem pretty darn simple, maybe too simple, I also was disappointed that you weren’t forming any kind of path. You weren’t planning out a journey. You were just crossing off hexes with restrictions.

However, when I actually sat down to play, I found that having so wide open a decision tree made the game a lot more interesting than I expected. If I had to create connections, the game would rapidly have become frustrating. And between trying to fill in dotted-line-enclosed areas and collect terrain, I found that I had goals and actual tough decisions. 

The Wayfarer is almost entirely abstract (although I am curious how well the terrain types match up with the real geography) but the actual gameplay was enough for me to have fun. It doesn’t hurt that it’s the sweet spot of being short enough to easily find the time for but long enough to feel like a ‘full’ game.

Each map set adds some additional way to get points, some additional wrinkle to the mix. And one of the expansions adds additional goals. (The other is an alternative to dice) So, in theory, there’s a lot of content.

The fact that I want to keep playing the Poland map and then move on to explore the rest of the game is a good sign. The Wayfarer is simple but filling.