Let's Go! To Japan Board Game Review

Written by Rob Burman

Does the thought of planning the perfect holiday fill you with joy? Do you tremble with anticipation at the idea of scheduling day trips, selecting restaurants or taking a stroll around new locations? Perhaps you love booking train travel to get you from place to place and squeezing as much as possible into a week-long holiday. Well, this could be the game for you!

What is Let's Go! To Japan

In Let’s Go! To Japan (as the name might imply) you’re planning a dream trip to Tokyo and Kyoto. The problem is that you’ve only got six days to cram in a whole host of activities, like eating the best food, visiting shrines, experiencing the nature of Japan and, of course, buying a whole bunch of manga collectables that will gather dust when you get home. The result is a drafting and set-collection game in which you try and build combos of activities.

How to Play Let's Go! To Japan

There are 13 rounds and each one sees you drafting Activity cards in various ways, then popping them into the days on your player board. We’re aware that 13 rounds sounds a lot but it’s actually pretty snappy once you get going. It’s worth noting here how absolutely gorgeous the illustrations are. Whether you’re visiting an anime museum or shopping in Shibuya, each activity is brought to life with some stunning visuals and bonus facts.

Throughout the drafting process, you’ve got to be mindful of the end-game, which is when you start scoring and moving the various tokens around your player board. As a result, you’ve constantly got to be planning ahead when drafting to make sure you maximise your score. Of course, sometimes the choices will be limited by what you draft, so you’ll just have to make the most of a bad situation. However, this is negated slightly by the opportunity to ‘take a walk’. If you don’t like any of the cards, you can discard them to draw a random card, which is placed face down on a chosen day and only revealed in the end-game. It’s a gamble that can pay off! 

When placing your card you can try to match up activities with randomly chosen experiences, e.g. on Monday you might be trying to visit shrines, while Thursday is dedicated to stuffing yourself silly. By matching these bonuses you’ll be able to increase your happiness or gain additional bonuses, like luxury train travel. Happiness is particularly important, as stress will decrease your final score, while joy will increase it. There’s a gentle balancing act between grouping together the same type of activity or ignoring the theme to boost a different element of your final score. 

What’s more, as if all this wasn’t enough, the activity cards will also move experience tokens along a tracker. This is important because the final activity card on each day will have a ‘highlight’ that may give you a bonus score if you’ve met certain requirements, such as the ‘shopping/goods’ token being on position three of the experiences track.

Let's Go! To Japan Review

With all this to think about, Let’s Go! does feel a little like everyone is solving their own puzzle with little player interaction. Yes, there’s the drafting element where you pass cards to players but it’s worth considering that it can feel a little solitary. However, we'd still recommend playing it.

The theme of Let’s Go! To Japan does most of the heavy lifting here. The illustrations and facts on each card are an absolute delight and provide many of the game’s talking points. Meanwhile, the gameplay is light and breezy with a quick playtime.

Buy Let's Go! To Japan on Amazon

You should try this game if you liked Parks. Both have a strong theme and gorgeous artwork, plus there’s that sense of putting together the perfect trip to boost your final score.

Looking for more family-friendly board games? Check out our list.

The Box

Designer: Josh Wood

Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group

Time: 45 minutes

Players: 1-4

Age: 10+

Price: £50

What’s in the box?

• 160 Activity cards
• 24 Favourable Condition tokens
• 20 Experience tokens
• 4 Stress tokens
• 4 Happiness tokens
• 4 Starting Train tokens
• 21 Train tokens
• 20 Wild tokens
• 24 Research tokens
• 16 Walk tokens
• 4 +12 tokens
• 4 Mood tokens
• 4 Player boards
• Round Tracker token
• Round Tracker board
• Rulebook
• Scorepad

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