Let’s Go! To Japan

“Day off in Kyoto, got bored at the temple” so sings Phoebe Bridgers. Which is sad because there’s clearly lots to do! Let’s Go! To Japan and find out what else we can experience!

Introduction

Let’s Go! To Japan is a really quite beautiful 1-4 player (5 if you snagged the upgraded Kickstart version which I regret not doing every day) drafting and set collection game, but with some nice bits of combo building and almost-programming-mechanisms thrown in almost under the radar. Designed by Josh Wood when COVID struck down his own trip to Japan with his girlfriend back in 2020. Throughout the game you’re doing a lot of planning – building your itinerary over 6 days in the cities of Tokyo and Kyoto. Side note – these are anagrams of each other in written English but not in Japanese. The reason is that Kyoto was formally the capital of Japan (and literally means ‘Capital City’) but when the capital was moved it was renamed to ‘Capital in the East’ – or Tokyo. It’s not just entertainment, it’s education here too! Enough of that though, Let’s Go!

Setup

The communal set up is simple – shuffle each separate city deck and place them in the middle of the table, along with the round tracking tile and the round marker. Done! Player set up needs a touch more care, but is still far from complicated. Each player places their beautiful tri-fold board in front of them, with room to place cards on each day space underneath. Take the five chunky Experience tokens and place them on the starting space on your Experience track. One player will take their six “favourable condition” tokens face down, shuffle them and then put one on each of the day spaces for the holiday you’re planning. Every other player will then place their tokens in the same order on their own boards. This is a nice bit of randomisation that subtly changes how Let’s Go! To Japan feels each time.

Everyone places their wooden player token on the central neutral space of their mood tracker, and adds a happiness token and a stress token on the corresponding spaces below. Everyone gets a starting train ticket and then all other tokens (wild experiences, notebooks, train tickets, walks) are placed in a supply for the table. And now you’re ready to go! Or, more honestly, more ready to plan to go.

Passing opportunities

The round tracking tile is going to tell you what to do (which is always nice) but this is typically drawing one or two cards from each city deck, playing one or two cards onto any space in your planner and then passing the remaining cards to the next player. After the first four rounds, you’ll alternate between drawing from the decks and drawing from the cards your neighbour has passed you, but continuing to play and pass as you’ve done previously.

I think this is a nice twist on drafting. If you’re feeling hyper competitive, you can really hamstring other players by discarding things the can’t make any use of, but there’s a chance those cards can come back to you so that’s a potentially high-risk strategy – especially as you switch the direction to pass halfway through the game

Play your cards right

I think where you’ll really succeed in Let’s Go! To Japan is how well you plan your trip. Each card typically has one or more symbols at the very top that correspond to the favourable condition tokens you placed during set up for each day. When you’ve placed your third card on any day, you count up the matching symbols and take a bonus. A single match allows you to move up one space on the mood tracker, while matching two gains you either a wild experience token (to be used later in the game) or two notebooks (which allow you the chance to draw and discard extra cards at the start of a round, or score appoint for each unused notebook at the end). Match three or more symbols and you’ll get a train ticket, allowing you to travel between the two cities in style, score two points and move up the mood tracker as well. Or you can choose to take an extra walk… more on this below.

But… here’s the catch. You’re probably going to need a fair amount of luck to find cards with matching symbols that are also in the same location – meaning you might end up traversing the main island of Honshu multiple times in a day – meaning that you then need more train tickets and possibly creating a bit of a vicious circle.

The first few times I played this, my ‘loss aversion’ attitude kicked in and I just split my journey down the middle – three days in Tokyo, three days in Kyoto. While that felt less stressful and more manageable, it definitely isn’t the path to victory (trust me)! Being on holiday and having new adventures is sometimes about taking risks, and I think Let’s Go! To Japan generally rewards you for it.

Once you’ve played a card, you can’t move it, but you can choose to slot other cards on top of or behind existing cards. And this is where your planning brain really needs to be sharp…

Highlight of the day!

Each card has a highlight at the very bottom, with a requirement on the left and a bonus on the right. You’ll only get to do the top-most highlight so placing your final card needs particular care. The requirements are typically having gained a certain number of experiences by the time you get to the highlight itself. You can keep track of this just by looking at the total exposed symbols on cards you’ve played up until that point so it’s not overly complex to know if you’ve met the requirement or not. However, they may be at odds with the favourable conditions for the day so there’s a little push/pull there to balance.

Day off in Kyoto

Maybe you just want some time off from the hustle and bustle and just want to see where life takes you. Maybe both cards you’ve been given are terrible and don’t help you in any way whatsoever. Why not go for a walk?

If this ends up being the case and you’re looking at two equally unappealing options in your hand, you can choose to just take a walk. Discard one of the cards to a communal pile on the table (and then pass the others are you normally would) and then draw a card from either city deck and place it face-down on a day in your planner.

By default all cards with their walk side showing will give you one positive step on the mood tracker and two victory points. When you come to scoring your day, you first flip the card and get to decide on a last minute, spontaneous experience and keep it that side up. Or you can place it back, face-down and just take a walk. You place a “walk” token on it as a reminder for any other highlights that possibly have walks as a requirement.

Again, I think this is nice and leans into that holiday theme – planning a bit of a downtime day, only to have the option of something unexpected thrown in at the last minute.

Holiday time!

When you’ve completed the final round, it’s time to actually take your trip and have your holiday in Japan! Assign any train tickets you’ve accumulated to make sure you’ve got the travel between cities sorted. If you have more travel than you’ve got train tickets, take extra from the supply, but place them with the “-2” showing as you’ve ended up on a less plush mode of transport and you’re paying the price for it.

The rulebook encourages you to talk through your experiences in the form of “we started off in Kyoto and visited the Fushimi Inari Shrine which gave us lots of opportunity to see some culture, but did sap our energy a little.” As you move through the story of each day, move the chunky experience tokens up the track as you score each card – effectively filling your holiday with different experiences as you go.

Move up or down the mood track as and when you hit a symbol, and going three steps in either direction then moves the happiness or stress tokens along their own tracks (giving you positive or negative points at the end).

Resolve each day’s highlight as you go, and allow everyone to talk through their Monday (and add scores to the included pad) before moving onto the next day in the week. Cards all have victory points in the top-right, and the highlight will hopefully score you some nice extra points. Remember to move up the mood track for taking the bullet trains as well.

You can also play wild tokens during this stage which might tip you over to just meeting a highlight requirement – use them wisely.

At the end, score points for train tickets, unused notebooks, the net points from your mood track as well as points for how far along your experience tokens made it up the central track. And as with most games, whoever scored the most wins!

Final thoughts

I was really looking forward to receiving my Kickstarter for this and the only disappointment has been I didn’t upgrade to get wooden tokens and a fifth player option. I’ve played this at 5, 4 and 2 players and it’s been great every time. I even had a few weeks’ break between games at one point and just teaching it to someone new at that point gave me a real sense of joy.

I think the theme works really well – more extravagant experiences on a day tend to move you down the mood tracker either due to their cost or the energy you’ve given to them, whilst enriching experiences boost your energy. Cards can have multiple icons that shows you’re getting a range of benefits from doing certain things, and I love all the flavour text that gives you real insight to what everything is.

Travel is interesting… and in real life it’s a lot less practical to start in Kyoto, visit a temple, hop on a train to Tokyo to see an arcade machine museum before making it back to Kyoto for some shopping… but this isn’t real life so you can get away with it here. I think the trade-offs are interesting, allowing you to throw yourself into the experiences each day, realising you might end up with some less comfortable travel, or you can try and balance everything for a great all-round experience.

I also think you can choose how you want to play this – either spending some time analysing and mapping out each day and each journey to maximise everything, or, like in my last game, just go with whatever vibes you feel – making impulsive decisions, using your gut and seeing what happens. Though what actually happened was I lost by a single point so maybe ‘vibes’ is a backup idea.

If you want a bit of a brain burner experience, you can have one, but if you just want spontaneity, you can have that too.

I really do like this and would wholeheartedly recommend.