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When you first look at Fantastic Trails, it gives off a pretty relaxed first impression. Colourful artwork, cute ants, a small box… it all looks quite approachable. Then you start playing and realise these ants are asking you to make some surprisingly difficult decisions.
In Fantastic Trails, you’re building up your own ant colony by creating trails across the forest floor. Over three rounds you’ll place numbers, complete objectives, collect honeydew, and try to create the longest possible trails on your cards.
It doesn’t take long before a harmless-looking placement comes back to haunt you twenty minutes later. We had plenty of moments where a number seemed harmless at the time, only to become a problem much later. Apparently our ants don’t always know where they’re going.
👥 1-4 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designer: Jordy Adan
🎨 Artwork: Oliver Freudenreich
🏢 Publisher: Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag (review copy provided)
Gameplay overview
A game of Fantastic Trails is played across three rounds. During each turn, a number card and a pattern card are revealed for everyone. The number tells you what value you’ll write, while the pattern tells you where you’re allowed to place it. Everybody uses the same cards, but everybody is building their own little section of forest.
The goal is to create trails by connecting adjacent spaces. To keep a trail going, each number has to be either the same as the previous one or exactly one higher. That sounds easy enough at first, but once your forest floor starts filling up, things become a lot less straightforward.
When the revealed cards don’t cooperate, you can spend worker ants to adjust things. Worker ants allow you to increase or decrease numbers, sometimes multiple times, or ignore the pattern restriction completely. A bad reveal rarely ruins your plans completely, but worker ants are limited enough that you can’t fix everything. Sometimes that’s exactly where the difficult decisions come from.
Objectives are scattered across the terrain cards and completing them gives rewards. Sometimes that’s extra worker ants, sometimes honeydew, and sometimes bonus placements that can trigger even more rewards. Honeydew is especially worth paying attention to because it scores at the end of every round. That means collecting it early can be surprisingly valuable, as those points keep coming back throughout the game.
At the end of the first two rounds, players expand their forest floor by choosing one of two new terrain cards. By the final round, everybody has built their own woodland puzzle with different objectives and scoring opportunities. Some cards also come with their own twists. Seed cards treat all spaces as adjacent during final scoring, while Flower cards ignore colour restrictions when placing numbers. These special rules are simple, but they noticeably change how you approach those cards and help the different terrain types feel distinct from one another.
After the third round, players score the longest trail on each individual card. Every space in a trail is worth one point. Add those points to your honeydew score and that’s your final result.
Artwork, components and visual design
The first thing you’ll probably notice is the theme. Most nature-themed games show forests from a human perspective. Fantastic Trails does the opposite. Everything is viewed from ant level. Suddenly mushrooms look huge, berries become landmarks, and even an old bone sticking out of the ground feels like part of the landscape.
The artwork is colourful without becoming messy. That’s something we appreciated more after a few plays. There are quite a few things happening on the cards, but the important information remains easy to find. The coloured patterns stand out clearly, objectives are readable, and the different card types are easy to recognise once you’ve seen them a couple of times.
The terrain cards themselves are probably the visual highlight. Pumpkin cards, mushroom cards, bone cards, berry cards and flower cards all have their own look and personality. After a while you start recognising them immediately, which helps speed up play and gives each new card a bit of character when it enters your forest floor.
Component-wise, there’s not a huge amount in the box. You get reusable cards, score sheets, markers, and the decks of cards that drive the game. Everything feels functional and easy to use, which is probably more important in a game like this than a table full of deluxe components would be.
The only thing worth mentioning is that the iconography may feel a little intimidating during the first game. Not because it’s particularly difficult, but because there are several different card types and objective symbols to learn. Once you’ve played a round or two, it becomes second nature, but the first explanation may take a little longer than people expect from a game that plays in around half an hour.
Our experience
Fantastic Trails isn’t really about building trails. It’s about keeping future trails possible. That sounds like a small distinction, but it changes how you look at almost every placement. On paper, a turn is very simple: reveal a number, reveal a pattern, write the number somewhere legal. In practice, every placement seems to have several consequences attached to it. A number can help extend a trail, complete a task, unlock a reward, reserve an important space for later, or accidentally block a route that looked promising a few turns earlier.
Because only the longest trail on each card scores, we regularly found ourselves questioning decisions we had made much earlier in the game. Completing an objective often feels useful in the moment, but if it breaks the natural flow of numbers across a card, it can easily cost more points than it gains. More than once we finished a task, collected the reward, and then realised a few turns later that we had made life much harder for ourselves. That constant balancing act between immediate rewards and future scoring became the heart of the game.
Worker ants ended up being one of the most important resources on the table. They stop the game from feeling too dependent on card draws, but they’re limited enough that every use feels important. Spending them early can help your forest floor develop quickly, but saving them for the final round can be just as valuable. We often found ourselves holding onto them “just in case”, only to discover that the perfect moment to spend them never really arrives. There’s always another turn where they could be useful.
Honeydew created more interesting decisions than we expected as well. Because it scores at the end of every round and isn’t spent, early honeydew often feels more valuable than honeydew collected later in the game. During the first round we frequently found ourselves tempted by recurring points, while the final round felt much more focused on making the best use of the spaces we still had available. Without ever changing the rules, the game naturally shifted our priorities from one round to the next.
The expanding forest floor works well as a pacing mechanism. Starting with only two cards keeps things manageable and gives players room to understand what their objectives are asking from them. By the time the third and fourth cards arrive, the puzzle has opened up considerably. The only thing we noticed is that the final card sometimes arrives a little late. In some games it felt like an exciting new opportunity. In others, it felt like there simply wasn’t enough time left to do very much with it. It’s not a major issue, but it was something we noticed over repeated plays.
The different terrain cards do a lot of work when it comes to keeping the game fresh. Some reward specific placements, others care about repeated numbers, completed areas, or unusual connections. The moments we enjoyed most were often the ones where a bonus placement completed a task, which unlocked another reward, which suddenly connected part of a trail we hadn’t been able to reach before. Those little chains don’t happen constantly, but when they do, they can completely change your plans for the rest of the round.
At the same time, Fantastic Trails can feel quite solitary. Everybody works with the same revealed cards, but the real puzzle is happening inside your own collection of terrain cards. We spent far more time comparing finished puzzles than reacting to one another during the game itself. For us that wasn’t a problem, but players who enjoy direct interaction will probably get more out of the optional wasp variant than the standard game.
The end-game scoring was also slightly more involved than we expected. Finding the longest trail on each card becomes one final puzzle before scores are counted. We enjoyed that final challenge because it felt like one last chance to get the most out of the trails and routes we’d been building all game. At the same time, I can imagine some players wanting the game to finish a little more quickly at that stage.
Our thoughts
Fantastic Trails combines route building, objectives, resource management and recurring scoring into a compact puzzle that feels more substantial than its small box suggests. None of these individual ideas are particularly new. We’ve seen route building, objectives, resource management and recurring scoring before. What surprised us is how naturally they fit together here. It never felt like we were managing separate systems. Most turns forced us to think about several of them at once.
The trail system is probably the strongest part of the design. Requiring numbers to stay the same or increase by exactly one creates a very different puzzle from simply filling spaces efficiently. You’re not collecting sets or crossing things off a checklist. You’re trying to preserve routes across a card while keeping enough flexibility to react to future card reveals. That gives Fantastic Trails its own identity and makes it feel different from many other flip-and-write games we’ve played.
What also surprised us is how often the rewards pull players in different directions. Honeydew wants your attention because it scores repeatedly. Objectives provide useful bonuses. Bonus placements can unlock completely new opportunities. None of those systems are particularly complicated on their own, but together they create situations where several options feel worthwhile. The most interesting turns were often the ones where a worker ant could extend a trail, complete an objective, or help collect honeydew, and all three options looked attractive.
There’s also a little more going on here than the artwork and box size initially suggest. The turn itself is easy to explain, but the variety of objectives, rewards and card types creates more upfront learning than some players may expect. Once everything clicks, the game flows smoothly, but the first play can feel a touch heavier than the cute ant theme might suggest.
We also noticed that some card combinations felt smoother than others. Certain objectives naturally fit with trail building, while others occasionally push players toward less efficient placements. That variety helps keep games from feeling identical, but it can also create situations where one setup feels slightly more forgiving than another. We never felt it was a major issue, but it’s something we noticed often enough to mention.
As for longevity, we still enjoyed seeing different combinations of terrain cards after several plays, but whether that remains interesting long-term will depend on how much you enjoy refining the same core puzzle. Players who enjoy finding slightly better solutions each time will probably get more mileage out of Fantastic Trails than players looking for constant surprises.
For us, Fantastic Trails ended up being one of those games that was easy to get back to the table. Not because it does anything revolutionary, but because the puzzle is satisfying and there’s always that feeling that next time you might build a slightly better network of trails. It won’t replace every flip-and-write in our collection, and I don’t think it needs to. What it offers is a charming theme, a satisfying puzzle, and enough variety to keep us interested.
📝 We received a review copy of Fantastic Trails from Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag.
