Wouter & Ymke 
Pack your bags, charge your phone, and get ready to take far too many pictures of your food. In Traveluencer, we’re travelling around the world, sharing posts about food, scenery and architecture, and trying to become the most popular travel influencer. Of course, posting something nice isn’t enough. People have their own interests, and what’s popular today might be completely forgotten tomorrow.
Traveluencer takes that idea and turns it into a trick-taking card game where you’re trying to collect as much buzz as possible. The unusual part is that you can combine several cards into one post, making it much more popular but also leaving you with fewer cards for later. So while everyone is chasing views, you’ll regularly have to decide whether your next post is really worth the effort.
Broadway Toys is bringing Traveluencer to Spiel Essen ’26. If it’s on your list, you can pre-order a copy and collect it from their stand in Hall 2, booth D610.
👥 2-4 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designer: Ryo Nakamura
🎨 Artwork: Daniel Cunha
🏢 Publisher: Broadway Toys LTD (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Traveluencer is played over three rounds, each consisting of seven tricks. Unlike most trick-taking games, you’re not limited to playing a single card. You can combine multiple cards of the same type into one post, arranging their numbers from lowest to highest to create a larger number. For example, playing a 2, 4 and 7 together creates a post with 247 views.
At the beginning of each round, everyone passes three cards to the player on their left. The seven upcoming trends are then revealed around the world map. Each trick has its own trend, which can be food, scenery, architecture or no trend at all. The starting player chooses a card type and publishes a post using one or more cards. Everyone else must follow that type if they can. Only players who don’t have any matching cards are allowed to publish a different type of post.
Normally, the post with the highest number of views wins the trick. If two posts have the same value, whoever played first wins. Trends can change the outcome, though. When someone cannot follow the starting type, they can play cards matching the current trend instead. That post beats any posts following the original type, regardless of their value. If several players follow the trend this way, the highest number wins. Play a different type that doesn’t match the trend and you cannot win that trick, no matter how impressive your number looks.
There are also stamp and souvenir cards that can increase your view count. Stamps add one zero to your post, while souvenirs add two. Both must be played alongside regular post cards, and there are restrictions on who can use them. The last player in a trick cannot play stamps, while souvenirs can only be played by the starting player. Adding a few zeroes can make quite a difference, so deciding when to use them becomes another part of managing your hand.
Winning a trick earns buzz tokens depending on how many cards you used. A winning post of one or two cards earns three buzz, three or four cards earn four, and five or more cards earn five. The winner also becomes the starting player for the next trick. You can’t simply spend everything whenever you want, though. If you run out of cards, you lose two buzz for each remaining trick in which you cannot publish. Cards left in your hand at the end of a round cost one buzz each, although you can never lose more buzz than you currently have.
You can also include unexpected events, which are revealed before the second, fourth and sixth tricks and can exchange cards, interfere with upcoming trends or restrict what players can do. The two-player game has its own rules, including face-up cards and the possibility of modifying a post after seeing what your opponent played. After three rounds, everyone adds up their buzz, and whoever has the most wins.
Artwork & Components
Traveluencer has a colourful presentation that immediately makes its theme clear. The post cards feature illustrations of food, landscapes and famous landmarks from around the world, with large numbers and small social media icons around the images. The three categories have different colours, so it’s easy to recognise what you’re holding. The illustrations by Daniel Cunha are quite varied, and I like that you can recognise several real destinations instead of looking at generic travel pictures.
The world map sits in the middle of the table and is probably the most unusual component. It’s a small board with blue oceans and yellow landmasses, surrounded by seven numbered spaces for the upcoming trends. There’s also a central space for the Unexpected Event deck. It doesn’t do anything particularly complicated. It simply keeps the seven tricks organised and means everyone can see the upcoming trends without having cards scattered randomly across the table.
Most of the remaining components are cards. The reference cards explain the scoring and penalties, while the unexpected event cards use yellow-and-black warning signs. They even have names like Lost Passport, which seems appropriate for a travel game. Although I imagine losing your passport would be slightly more annoying than losing a card from your hand. The stamp and souvenir cards have their own illustrations as well, so they’re easy to recognise among the regular posts.
The buzz tokens are shaped like red hearts, fitting the social media theme nicely. The production itself is fairly simple, with the colours, travel pictures and social media details making it easy to see what everything represents.
Our Experience
Our first game of Traveluencer went quite smoothly. We already knew the basics of trick-taking, so following card types and comparing values didn’t take much explanation. Playing several cards at once was where things became less familiar. During our first game, we were perhaps a bit too easily tempted by the possibility of creating a huge number. Someone would play two cards, another player would respond with three or four, and suddenly a large part of two hands had disappeared just to decide one trick. Winning with a massive post feels good. Looking down afterwards and discovering that most of your hand has gone? Less so.
One of our rounds ended with us doing almost the opposite. We’d been so careful about not running out of cards that several of them were still sitting in our hands at the end, costing us buzz anyway. On other occasions, we deliberately used our final cards even though we knew a penalty might follow. If the post was worth enough buzz, we were fine with that. Somewhere between those two extremes, we also got much more comfortable simply letting tricks go. If somebody wanted to throw four cards at a post we’d barely invested in, they were welcome to it. We didn’t need to turn every post into an argument.
Then there were the trends. Saving several scenery cards for an upcoming scenery trend seemed like a perfectly good plan until another player led scenery one trick too early and forced one of those cards out of our hand. That happened more than once. Once we realised what was happening, we started trying the same thing ourselves. If somebody appeared to be keeping a particular type, we’d sometimes lead it before the relevant trend arrived. It was very satisfying when we guessed correctly. We also confidently tried it a few times when the other player had no such cards left. So much for reading the table.
Four cards of the same type also gave us a surprisingly awkward question. Do we keep them for several posts, combine some of them, or throw all four down and get rid of that type completely? Becoming empty in a type turned out to be something we actively wanted at times, because it gave us more freedom when a useful trend appeared later. We barely considered that during our first game. A few games later, we were sometimes combining cards specifically to empty a type, not because we needed a huge number. We also started paying much more attention to what types seemed to be disappearing from other players’ hands.
Player count made a noticeable difference for us. We clearly preferred Traveluencer with three or four players. It was harder to predict what would be led next and whether the cards we were saving would actually survive until we wanted them. The two-player version changes quite a bit, with visible cards and the possibility of improving a post after seeing your opponent’s play. It works, but we didn’t enjoy the duel nearly as much. We also ended up preferring the game without the unexpected events. Some gave us funny situations. There was already enough interference coming from the people sitting around the table.
Our Thoughts
Traveluencer is built on familiar trick-taking rules, but the multi-card system is the part I like most. Winning with three or four cards only gives you one more buzz than winning with one or two, and using five or more only adds another point. That made us look at a winning post differently. A post made from five cards may be almost impossible to beat, yet those cards could potentially have been used across several later tricks. Losing cheaply can be perfectly fine as well. If somebody spends four cards to beat the single card you played, taking the loss doesn’t feel particularly painful.
The same cards can also do several different jobs. A group of scenery cards might be useful for an upcoming trend, spread across several posts, or played together so you no longer have scenery in your hand. I like that none of those choices is automatically correct. What the other players are holding matters, as does the order of the upcoming trends. We wouldn’t put Traveluencer among the trick-taking games we play for their long-term strategy. Still, there was more going on in our hands than I expected when we first saw the colourful travel theme.
The souvenir is one part we’re less keen on. Only the starting player can use it, and the winner of a trick leads the next one. Somebody who’s already doing well can therefore sometimes get another useful advantage. We had situations where a player won, took the lead and then used their souvenir to make the next post very difficult to beat. It didn’t decide every game we played. Trends can still interfere, but I would have preferred the souvenir not to favour the player who has just won.
My bigger issue is the unexpected events. The upcoming trends are useful because you can actually plan around them. Some events suddenly interfere with that preparation by exchanging cards or changing the situation, which made planning around the map less appealing for us. I mean, the other players were already perfectly capable of ruining our plans themselves. Fortunately, the events are easy to leave out, and the rulebook even recommends playing your first game without them. We preferred it that way.
Without the events, different hands, trend orders and the decisions of the other players provide most of the variation. I’m not sure Traveluencer would keep us occupied for dozens and dozens of plays in the same way as our favourite dedicated trick-taking games, and I don’t think it needs to. It’s relatively easy to teach. Even so, there were enough occasions where we’d stare at a perfectly playable hand and decide that, actually, we’d rather not win this one.
People who enjoy trick-taking or hand-management card games will probably get the most from it. Those mainly playing with two or looking for something with more long-term planning may get less out of it. We enjoyed Traveluencer more as we became less obsessed with winning every trick and started paying more attention to what everyone was doing with their cards. It won’t replace our favourite trick-taking games, but it does enough differently that I’d happily join another trip.
📝 We received a copy of Traveluencer from Broadway Toys LTD.
Going to Spiel Essen ’26? We’re reviewing a selection of this year’s new releases.
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