Josh Wood’s 2024 game Let’s Go! To Japan took a thwarted vacation and turned it into a fun, challenging game of trip-planning that remains one of the best examples of integrating theme with mechanics. The sequel to that hit title, Let’s Go! To France, is coming to Kickstarter on May 19. The A.V. Club spoke to Wood about how the first game came about, how the new title differs in concept and execution, and why his next game in the series might be set somewhere novel.
The A.V. Club: Let’s Go! To Japan was one of my favorite new games of 2024, not least because it has such a great back story and ties the theme so well to its mechanics. For folks who don’t know, give me the genesis of that first game.
Josh Wood: So, the story is I’d been planning for a few years to go to Japan, with my now-wife. We had been saving money and we’d been planning the trip, everything was booked, and we were supposed to go…in April of 2020. Of course, because of the pandemic, all that got shut down and we weren’t able to go. During the time that we were supposed to be there, I would say things to my partner like, “oh, this is the day that we’d be at the tea ceremony,” or, “this would have been the day that we were going to the monkey park.” It sort of dawned on me that the idea of thinking about the trip and planning it was so much fun. I took all my notes and thought, as a way to kind of cheer myself up, how it would be kind of cool to think about this as like a game. There’s a lot of stuff that goes into planning a trip, like budgets, where you’re going to go, what you’re going to appreciate. That’s just sort of how I started it.
Then I took a real deep dive into Japanese culture. I started learning the language. I was doing a lot of research about the best places and very small details about what’s special about this shrine versus this other shrine, or the origin of how this food came into the country. I thought it would be a really cool idea to have a game where you just have like a big stack of cards with all this information on them and you would use them to plan your trip. And for people who can’t go on trips, they can play the game and get that feeling of actually going on the trip. Maybe I’d inspire people to travel more.
AVC: So Japan was a years-long dream destination. How’d you settle on France?
JW: I think first of all, other people knew I was going to make this into a series before I did. Even during the first Kickstarter, people said “This is going to be a series.” I thought, “It is?”
I took a real deep dive into Japan, so the next game was going to be a place where I wanted to do that again. I didn’t want to choose a place that was uninteresting to me. I wanted to move the series into Europe—board games are big in Europe and Americans tend to travel more to Europe. So then I had to decide among a few obvious ones: Which one do I want to go to more, or maybe could learn more about? This time around I knew I was going to go on the trip and create the game based on that, which was the opposite of how I made the first game.
Let’s Go! To Japan centers around five different experience icons, so for France, it was natural that one would be art. I like art museums—I have two art degrees, so I had to take seven or eight art history classes throughout my studies. This was a good chance for me to go to art museums. I also think French food is really good, and food will always be important to me in these games.
AVC: You said you learned Japanese for the first game. Parlez-vous français?
JW: I studied French in high school but I don’t remember much. I was surprised at how many signs I could read there, though.
AVC: Quel dommage. I’ve got a copy of the game and saw that now there’s just one deck, versus two decks in the original for Tokyo and Kyoto.
JW: I worked on this idea for Let’s Go! To France where the deck would just be Paris, and you’d have these region boards in addition. Despite the fact that I put Tokyo and Kyoto in the Japan game, a lot of people were like, what about Osaka, or Kobe, or Okinawa. I didn’t get to cover their stories. I can’t put every city in the game, but there’s no sister city to Paris. There are so many small communes and villages you can go visit and have a wonderful time, and I wanted to cover those. People would tell me or their friends about different places like the Loire Valley or Normandy or the Cote d’Azur. So in the game, there are side maps you get to walk around and get little experiences (besides the main experiences in Paris). That’s one of the changes between the two games; I made trains such a big part of Let’s Go! To Japan that I felt like I couldn’t do that again. I didn’t want the games to be so similar that this felt like a reskin.
AVC: That makes sense to me based on the times I’ve been to France, although I guess Cote d’Azur is a little far for a day trip.
JW: The way the map works, you’re theoretically planning the week before you go to Paris. Maybe the week in Cote d’Azur and then I’ll go to Paris for a week. Because I think that’s also what a lot of people would do.”‘I’m going to be in Paris and I’m also going to route another region.”
AVC: The game is heading to Kickstarter on May 19. For people who are considering backing the game, what are the big differences? Going from two decks to one is a huge difference. And we don’t have the trains, which makes the game simpler but loses some of the tension around moving back and forth between the two cities. And it looks like activity tokens work differently here as well.
JW: The cards kind of work the same in the fact that you are still playing cards to different days, and then you stack them. The big difference is that your highlight of the day automatically scores. There are no requirements (as in Let’s Go! To Japan), so people are a little bit more freed up to go for bigger combos.
Now you can be more of the player who’s like, I’m going to be the art guy, I’m going to be the history guy, I’m going to be the food person. Or you can combine them—I’m really going to be into architecture and history, or like art and architecture, right? Where in Japan, you have to be a little bit more harmonious and do a little bit of everything.
One of the ways that I added the tension back in now that the trains are gone is that every card has time on it. So obviously going to Versailles is going to take more time than just eating a croissant. Eating a croissant is a one-time card, where going to Versailles is a four-time card. And you can put as many or as few cards as you want on a day. I mean, you can go up to five cards, so you can go anywhere between technically zero to five cards on a day. And how much time you spend on each day is going to affect your overall mood.
When I go on vacation, I’m the kind of person who’s out there walking 12 miles every day. I get really exhausted by it, but I see more things. Some people say, “I got to stay relaxed the whole trip, even though I didn’t get to see nearly as much.” And some people do also kind of a little bit of a split, right? They have a really big day and then they kind of relax the next day. And so that’s another way that people can kind of tell their travel story because something that interests me is that not everyone travels the same as I do. So I want people to be able to kind of input how they feel like they would take the trip or to fantasize about how they wish they could travel, and put that push and pull into the game.
AVC: Have you thought about a location for a third game in the series, or is it too soon for that?
JW: I do think I want to go a little bit more out of left field for them for the next one. I’ve been thinking about ideas like, maybe it’s not just a strict country? Maybe it is something more like Let’s Go! To the Zoo or something. I want it to feel different. I grew up in New Orleans and Let’s Go! To New Orleans, because that’s a fun place to visit. It’s not something that would be expected, but there’s a lot to do.
AVC: That sounds fantastic. I love New Orleans. For tourism, it’s one of the best places in the U.S. It’s one of the only places in the U.S. with its own unique food culture, actually.
JW: Right. I think my only problem is that the only experience icon that I think could exist in that game is probably the food.
AVC: Yep.
JW: And drinking. I’d have to separate those two.
AVC: I’d play that. Do you feel like this game is more or less complexthan the first one?
JW: I believe that this is a little bit easier to play than Let’s Go! To Japan. People who are bigger into big combos and min-max should like this game too, so I think I will appeal to some more people who like a little bit heavier of a strategy game because there are many more combos they can do. But ultimately I think this will appeal more to people who maybe found Let’s Go! To Japan a little bit more difficult or harder to teach. So that’s something I’m very proud of in this one. But in the end this is obviously a game for people who like to travel and think about that kind of stuff, whether you’re a big Francophile or you’re just the sort of person who can kind of find fun whenever you travel.
AVC: I actually played the Japan game with my younger stepdaughter, who’s nine now, and is pretty into the games. And she really didn’t have a problem. Some of the finer points of the strategy she couldn’t do, but other than that, she got it. She was totally fine with it. And she’s obsessed with Japan also. She keeps asking us, why aren’t we taking a trip to Japan? I’m like, this is a globe. Japan is far and very expensive. But at that age you have no concept of distance, right? I get on the magic plane and I land somewhere else.
JW: Until you’ve done one of those 14-hour flights or whatever, it just seems inconceivable, right? I will say, though, by the way, traveling on a plane is way better than it was when I was a kid, right? When I was a kid, we didn’t have entertainment systems in the back of the things. No one had iPhones and iPads. You’d have one of those weird, well, even this wasn’t around when I was a kid, but you know, you’d have those portable DVD players. And I remember thinking, this is the way of the future. And then new technology made it obsolete almost immediately.
AVC: I went to Europe for the first time in 1989, I think it was. We had to bring books. That was it.
JW: Yeah, you bring books and you just pray that you’re going to sit next to someone who’s kind of interesting to talk to. You’re like, I’m going to talk to this person for a few hours.
AVC: You probably saw that on Air New Zealand flights from JFK to Auckland, you’ll be able to rent a bunk bed for four-hour shifts on them now because it’s a 17-hour flight. I’m like, yeah, I’m doing that. I’m absolutely not sitting in a seat for 17, 18 hours. Maybe that can be your next game: Let’s Go! To A 17-Hour Flight.
JW: I mean, someone did pitch to me the idea, like, I could just make a whole game about “What am I doing there at the airport?” Let’s Go! To The Airport.
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