Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
At this point in the “verb-and-write” board game lifecycle, you are in, or you are out.
A number of people in my network love these games, from Yahtzee! to the Welcome to… series to Euro-adjacent works such as Joan of Arc: Orléans Draw and Write to quieter efforts like the Next Station series. Hand me a dry-erase board or a pencil with a pad of paper, and let’s get to work by not talking to other players for 20 minutes.
A number of people in my network abhor these games; the lack of interaction, or the idea that everyone is using the same common elements (the same flipped cards, the same die results, etc.) to maximize point totals in private. Sometimes, I can feel other players staring at my sheet to see what I chose, in the possibly nefarious attempt to copy my action. (I’m not saying they are bad people…actually, maybe I am saying that.)
No matter what, you have an opinion. A couple years ago, I was exhausted by this gaming category, so thankfully we have moved on to trends like pared-down Euros (look, over there…it’s a lighter version of Terra Mystica!), two-player-only versions of games you know (a copy of The White Castle: Duel is on the way), and games featuring the colonization of animals instead of people. (It’s still colonization, whether anyone wants to admit that or not.)
Enter the game En Route. Published by CrowD Games in 2025 and designed by Philipp Ivanov, En Route’s subtitle is “A Stroll and Write Game.” On the box’s back cover, the game looked a lot like Let’s Make a Bus Route, a game I was lukewarm on. But I withheld judgment until I got En Route to the table.
Then I remembered that CrowD also published Bestiary of Sigillum, easily my biggest surprise of 2024. En Route might take the cake for 2025 as the game from Gen Con I was least excited to try and was most pleasantly surprised to review…because it is excellent. (Note that I was given a copy of the En Route: Special Edition for review, with a few nicer extras than the base game.)
Yes, An Interactive Verb-and-Write
My big thing with roll/flip-and-write games is pretty simple: whether they are played solo or in a larger group, everyone is usually reacting to a central object and working by themselves to max out the results of that object. That usually leaves me cold to the group experience—these are basically solo games, scaled up to become either a high-score challenge or a race to see who best drew lines on a map or crossed off boxes in the right order.
En Route takes a different approach. Although there is a solo mode—and that solo mode allowed me to get a couple plays beyond my multiplayer experiences—I highly recommend En Route as a multiplayer game.
Each player is given a dry-erase board that serves as a map of one of about a dozen cities—a made-up location, “First City”, plus real-world places that are usually drawn on a 6×6 map of that place. London, Rio de Janeiro, Vegas, etc. Each column and row has coordinates…but each player’s map of the city has coordinates that run along different sides of their grid. For example, player one’s grid has the number 1-6 running north to south along the left-hand side of their grid, and they have the numbers 1-6 running west to east along the bottom of their grid. The second player’s numbers run along the bottom and the right sides of their grid, and so on.
All players have a hand of three cards, showing a large number (with a range of 1-6) in the upper left-hand corner, along with the picture of tourists in three different colors. The active player chooses one of their three cards to play face up in the middle of the table. Then, the players to the left and right of the active player pick a single card from their hands to add to the display, face down. The active player looks at both face-down cards, then picks one to be the second coordinate that will be used to plot that turn’s actions for all players.
All players then use the two coordinates, in either order—so, a 1-4 or a 4-1—to draw the pictured tourists in the specific section of their board if possible, then they draw two lines as routes alongside that coordinate on the map. The routes, drawn in purple, will eventually need to form a route that you, as that map’s tour guide, will use to guide tourists through the city used in that game. If a player cannot or chooses not to draw two lines next to the active coordinates, they can draw one route line anywhere on their map.
So, on every turn, most players will have a chance to influence every action, in a very deterministic way. (In a four-player game, one player is left out of the voting/decision process.) Finding ways to use the map to your advantage with the selected numbers is the whole game, and with only 10 turns, that game is gonna be over before you know it.
The spacial puzzle is fun. Each map has a slightly different set of rules, landmarks to hit, and ways to score points outside of the main tourist scoring mechanic, making each new game a slightly unique challenge. Everyone is dealt a set of personal milestone cards that can be used for extra points. Some of the cards feature landmarks that, when selected by the active player, are used to boost the value of certain spaces over others. Some icons on the map provide bonus actions, so finding the best routes to include those for scoring ends up being big too.
Then the package gets deeper. Don’t like more deterministic experiences? Use the included dice instead to figure out which coordinates and tourists show up on a turn, creating intense chaos almost right from the jump. Playing with younger or less experienced players? Include the Balance cards, to give each player a free route to draw once each game. I’m not an events guy, but if that’s your thing, throw in the event cards. There are individual play modes for solo, standard, and advanced rules, and there’s even a team mode, if you’ve got a full four-player complement.
And if you fall in love with En Route the way I think you will, do the campaign version of the game instead. Over the course of just three games (yes! a short campaign variant!!), 2-4 players can determine who is the best of the best by playing games across three different maps. There are even secret cards wrapped in foil that need to be discovered, for the En Route superfan waiting to find their next big hit.
No Notes
One of the guys from my review crew had tried the Twilight Imperium roll-and-write, Twilight Inscription, a couple years ago. I had, too. Both of us remembered the experience as one of the reasons why I had simply given up on this category of games. They did nothing for me, and my fear was that they were beginning to spiral out of control in ways that were not productive for the hobby.
That person and one other guy from the crew joined me for my first multiplayer game of En Route, and it was clear even halfway through that game how much we all loved what En Route was doing. I don’t think I would have loved it as much had it been released in the midst of all those other verb-and-write games in 2022-2023, when the category was becoming a bit overcrowded.
Now, with less new competition in this space, it’s easy to see why En Route works so well. It is shockingly flexible. Each game will be unique. There are so many maps included here that it’s hard to imagine anyone getting bored with the base game any time soon. The bright art and solid production highlight a product that I think people will love when it hits their table, and the variety of game modes make it an easy recommendation whether you are diving in solo or playing it with others.
I’ll be keeping this for couples’ date nights or nights with more players, because that’s where the magic is around turn-to-turn writing selections. In fact, three players ended up being my best play—that’s because on every turn, every player affects the table’s actions, with no one left out in the cold. (In a two-player game, the opponent selects two cards from their hand to pair with the active player’s face-up card, which I felt gave the non-active player a slight advantage when picking spots for a turn.)
If I’m being picky, the dry-erase markers are not the best. Be ready to swap in some of your own if it comes right down to it. Otherwise, En Route is a solid entry into the verb-and-write category; players fatigued by the raft of recent releases should definitely add this one to their collection.
En Route: Special Edition details
- Designer: Philipp Ivanov
- Artists: Ekaterina Mamontova
- Publishers: Crowd Games
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 1 - 4
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 20 - 40 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Connections, Grid Coverage, Line Drawing, Network and Route Building, Paper-and-Pencil, Solo / Solitaire Game
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.69372 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
- More articles about En Route: Special Edition.
