Build the Most Scenic Road in America in the Great Board Game Big Sur

By Keith Law | July 30, 2025 | 2:00pm

Tabletop Reviews board games

Build the Most Scenic Road in America in the Great Board Game Big Sur

Big Sur turns a 5-minute teach and a deck of custom cards into a game that balances quick turns with a puzzly mechanic, making what might otherwise be a light family game into something a little meatier and very replayable.

In Big Sur, players are competing to build their version of California 1 along the Pacific coast, playing cards from their hand both to simulate portions of the highway and as resources to construct them. A road card costs either two or three resources to build—there are no resource tokens in the game, as it’s all done with the cards—and will score one to four points at game-end if that road is part of a longer “stretch.” Road cards of one mile give you one free resource of a specific type on every turn for the rest of the game. Road cards of two miles have some kind of bonus text that gives you game-end points or maybe a little boost during the game.

Each road card also has two scenery symbols, which might be two of the same one, out of the five total in the game. There are three ways to score in Big Sur, and the most fundamental one is to create “stretches” of road containing at least three matching scenery symbols on adjacent cards. So four cards in a row that all show the forest symbol would score, with each card earning points equal to its mileage. Two adjacent cards showing the flower, where one card has two flowers, would also score, since that stretch has the requisite three matching symbols.

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Big Sur board game

On your turn, you must draw two Highway cards from the market, and then may play as many road cards from your hand as you can pay for. When you use a card as a resource, you place it face-down into your discard pile; the resource showing on the top card on that pile is then available to you once per turn for free. Once you create a stretch, you may be able to claim a Landmark card from the five available, each of which gives you a game-end point bonus or an additional power (such as using another player’s one-mile free resource), with further points based on how many Landmark cards you have.

Play continues until the card deck is exhausted, after which, players add up those scores—mileage from stretches of road, bonuses from two-mile cards, points from Landmark cards—and determine the winner. The deck size changes based on player count, with a maximum of four players, which uses the entire deck.

It’s an elegant design with great art that you could throw in any bag by just taking the card deck—there is a score pad (and a pencil!) and a first-player token, but you don’t really need those to play. Turns can easily take less than a minute, and it gets easier to build as the game progresses because you should start gaining free resources from the one-mile cards and your discard pile (plus maybe some other bonuses). The fun is trying to do the mental math to figure out how best to build out those stretches—such as when to end one and start another, although they can and will overlap—and how best to deploy the limited resources you have. It seems like it’s best to end the game with as few cards in your hand as possible, just because that’s going to mean you played efficiently. There’s no hand limit, but once you get free resources you’re not going to want or need to hoard cards—it’s better to keep building and playing to claim landmarks and make your highway more powerful.

The two-mile and Landmark cards do have text, while everything else is handled by icons that are easy to distinguish. I think the text is the only reason you couldn’t play this with younger kids, but beyond that I didn’t see any rules or mechanics that would be confusing—it’s the mental math aspect that would separate players, and I have always figured that just makes the game a teaching tool, rather than saying “you’re not old enough.” The box suggests 30 minutes; that’s for four players, and I’ve played a two-player game in less than 20 minutes. If you’ve ever played Happy City, this game hits a lot of the same points, but does it better. It’s small and simple, but I think it’s a little gem. It just needs a Jack Kerouac promo card.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.