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.
Two or three turns into my first play of The Amazing Journey, I knew we had a winner.
A take on the Jules Verne novel Around the World in 80 Days, players take on the role of exceptionally well-illustrated animals who are trying to make an around-the-world trip in 80 days or less. Each turn, a player must take at least two actions and be at or ahead of other players on the action space track…a track which (of course) runs around the outside of the board with 80 total spaces.
Each action uses time, and based on the player’s current location, they have access to certain routes on the main board: travel by bus, train, balloon, or other forms of transportation that align with a specific time cost to navigate.
This turns The Amazing Journey into a moderately thinky, point-to-point connection game that was enjoyed by both gamers and casual players in equal measure. That’s because the movement system is such a treat.
The game’s main board comes in two flavors: regular, and fast. Even on regular speed, The Amazing Journey played in about an hour, so fast truly is for a player who is under a major time constraint. The random board setup has three checkpoints that players have to hit in order to reach their around-the-world goals, but how they reach those checkpoints is entirely up to each player. Movement along pre-printed routes usually costs two time (days); a card ticket system is also available to cut that time in half, if a player has either a ticket matching the color of the route they want to use, or any two tickets to use as a wild card.
The main way to score is through location tokens, which come in two types: experiences (a set collection mechanic, with bonuses featured for collecting up to three experience tokens of the same type) and souvenirs (straight-up points, with bonus points given for each set of two souvenirs). Moving to locations that still have a token in their space grants the active player a chance to collect that token…but token collection uses time, so balancing that against the race to finish the trip in under 80 days is vital.
One final consideration: players who finish their journey in more than 80 days lose one point per day past 80. That could be a major hit, in a game where players might only score 40 or 50 points.
The Amazing Journey truly is amazing in a couple of areas, and that starts with the artwork by Adam Wójcicki. My goodness, the art on the ticket and objective cards (adding points for players who complete experiences matching the symbols on cards in hand) is the kind of card art that made other players stop and admire it up close. There are eight playable characters, and those illustrations (and the character names, such as a lizard named Lisette Lézard and a rooster named Hendrika van Dwalen) help create a world around the adventure.
I’ve mentioned that a Fast mode is available, which I think might be the call at a higher player count. The setup variety also allows for differing start, middle, and end checkpoints for the race, and the eight characters each have a power that can be used three times in total during the game. Because of how location tokens can be snapped up by an opponent, The Amazing Journey features relatively quick turns and plenty of reasons to watch everyone else take turns.
The pacing is excellent. Players can move through tokenless locations with a single move along the transportation type selected at the start of a movement action. The game’s final third moves very quickly, as skipping around the map becomes quite easy…assuming a player is trying to finish in those 80 days. I’ve also seen players intentionally try to finish well past 80 days to complete high-scoring set collection activities to boost the bottom line. That gives The Amazing Race a number of different paths to victory from a replayability perspective.
On Normal, a four-player game of The Amazing Journey can get a little slow, so I’m now prewired to play this game with three players on the Regular side of the map. Also, I have found the bonus points aligned with reaching each of the three checkpoints to be a bit random. In some games, landing in just the right spot on the action track to get two or three bonus points was pretty easy, while in others, the spaces didn’t quite fit because of a dice mechanic that requires players to add days whenever they grab a location token. (Yep, there’s a die. Poor rolls might derail your ability to score well in some instances.)
On their own, dice are not a killer, but it is something to consider, particularly for my strategy game lovers who worry that dice can ruin everything.
Beyond that, The Amazing Journey continues a stellar year of output from the team at Italian publisher Horrible Guild, from The Queen’s Dilemma to the My Murder Mystery titles, including A Dead Monkey. And based on the Horrible Guild titles coming up, the team continues to pump out solid fare. The Amazing Journey fits as both a family+ strategy game and a long filler for core hobbyists.
The Amazing Journey details
- Designer: Hjalmar Hach, Lorenzo Silva
- Artists: Adam Wójcicki
- Publishers: Horrible Guild
- Release Date: 2026
- Player count : 2 - 4
- Age range : 8+
- Time range : 45 - 60 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Area Movement, Connections, Dice Rolling, Once-Per-Game Abilities
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.336 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about The Amazing Journey.
