Let’s Go to Japan Lets You Go to Japan (in Board Game Form)

By Keith Law | September 27, 2024 | 10:30am

Video Games Reviews board games

Let’s Go to Japan Lets You Go to Japan (in Board Game Form)

Josh Wood had always wanted to go to Japan, so he and his girlfriend spent three years saving up and planning for a trip there. They had everything booked … for the summer of 2020. So he did what any normal, well-adjusted person would do in that situation: He turned all of his notes and plans into a board game, called Let’s Go to Japan. I’m sorry for Josh’s struggles (although I understand he did eventually get to Japan after the country re-opened to tourists in October 2022), but his temporary loss is our gain. This game rocks.

Let’s Go to Japan sticks to its theme: Each player will draw and play cards to plan a six-day itinerary to Tokyo and Kyoto over 13 rounds, at the end of which the players score their trips from Monday to Saturday so that places you visit on previous days help you score cards from later in the week. There’s a mixed card-drafting mechanic where you draw two or four cards, playing half and passing the other half to a neighboring player, although the game makes it easy to get new cards if you ever find yourself stuck or facing a hand of less interesting stops. The scoring revolves around set collection and sequencing, as most cards give you one or more symbols representing the type of activity it is and whether it boosts your mood (giving you energy or saving you money) or brings you down (exhausting you or sapping your wallet).

The game has two decks, one for Tokyo and one for Kyoto, and in most rounds you’re taking cards from each. Over the course of the six days, you can move between the cities as often as you want, but you’ll need to take trains between them and those typically cost you two victory points per train you use. When you start each game, one player places an activity token at random on each of the six days, with the other players then matching the pattern; these tokens then determine the preferred activity type for that day for all players. You can play up to three cards per day (with one exception, but put a pin in that), and once you’ve filled up a day that way, you claim a bonus based on how many of the matching activity icons you have on those three cards. These bonuses include research tokens that let you draw three cards from either or both decks, then discarding any three cards from your hand; wild card tokens that can serve as an icon of your choice at game-end; luxury trains, which are worth +2 points and let you avoid the two-point penalty of riding with the hoi polloi; and Walk cards, which you take from either deck and add face-down to that day, revealing it at final scoring to decide how to use it. When you play a card to any day, you choose whether to put it on top of any cards already there or to slide it behind the top card, in which case you can only see its icons and base victory points.

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Let's Go to Japan

Once the 13th round has ended, players then take/use train tokens to account for any travel and then score their days left to right, Monday through Saturday. Every card has some point value in the upper right and you score all of those for each day. One card will have its bottom scoring visible for each day as well; these are conditional and only score if you’ve met the criteria on the left part, which usually means having a certain number of a specific icon already showing by that day of the week. As you score each card, you’ll move the matching tracker token on your board for every icon showing on your cards—so if you have two shopping icons on your Monday cards, you move the shopping token two spots to the right on the tracker, which helps you keep track of activities you’ve already achieved for scoring other cards and can give you additional points in the final scoring. During this phase, any time you have a Walk card, you can flip it over and decide whether to use its face value for icons/points or stick with the Walk side, which has a +1 mood symbol and can be worth two victory points if it’s the top card for the day.

Once you’ve finished with all six days, you check each of the five tracker tokens to see the highest point marker they’ve passed on the track, which can be anywhere from 0 points for the first few spaces to 15 if you reach the end. You also can gain or lose points from the mood trackers if you get enough (or too many) of the same symbols during the scoring.

The theme and art here really do wonders for the game—there’s a ton of flavor text across all of the cards and they’re based on real places in both cities, with four of the five illustrators either Japanese natives or American expats living in Japan. The board and cards make great use of white space so it’s easy to look at everything and get a sense of what you have and what you need, and as someone whose use of glasses for reading is increasing at an alarming rate, I was pleased to see some simple yet smart design choices like putting the more important card text in all caps or in bold, leaving the small font for the flavor text. This just feels like a game that’s many years in the making because it’s so smart and polished. I’ve always wanted to go to Japan anyway—you’d think given my day job it would have happened by now, but it turns out Japan is kind of far, and expensive to get to—so Let’s Go to Japan has only further stoked that fire. I think it’s fantastic.

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.