Out here in the northeastern United States and in many other locations this summer, it’s been too hot and humid to even consider finding a hiking trail, hopping on a bike, or renting a kayak. Luckily you can do all three from the safety of your air-conditioned home with the compact, map-building card game Trailblazers!

Game Name: Trailblazers (2025)
Publisher: Bitewing Games
Player Count: 1-4 Players
Playing Time: 30+ minutes
Review Date: 7/10/2025
Reviewed By: Chuck

Upfront Disclaimer: Bitewing Games generously provided us with a copy of “Trailblazers” for purposes of testing it out and writing a review. No compensation was provided and we were free to write whatever we wanted about the game. All opinions contained within are my own unbiased thoughts.

Trailblazers makes a strong first impression with its “Travel Edition” art style and packaging. The entire game fits into a nicely textured, compact cube with zippered enclosure and carabiner for travel – you can hook your outdoors-y game onto your backpack or other outdoors-y accessory of choice. The cards and accessories have been shaped well to fit this form factor: the rulebook is sized to match the full-size cards, but the biggest deck of cards you use is composed of long, half-size cards, a form factor I haven’t seen much that makes for easy packing.

Good luck with a clean shuffle, though! Trailblazers fits an impressive amount of content into its travel size, with 178 cards, 60 animal tokens, and two rulebooks (the standard one and another tailored for solo play). The vast majority of those cards are the aforementioned half-size trail cards, and the end result of stacking them into a usable deck is long and awkward, hard to shuffle without wince-inducing bending and hard to shuffle at all without some creative use of cuts and a lot of patience. The quantity of cards is crucial to the game’s functional variety, but I wish Bitewing Games had figured out a stronger solution for cards that felt as playable as they are durable and colorful.

Those colors are bright and contrast-y, and well-fitted both aesthetically and mechanically. Red denotes biking trails; blue reflects kayaking rivers and streams; brown marks dirt paths for hiking. Camp cards mirror these colors as much as possible to ensure clear gameplay while still packing nice, artful detail. The trail cards themselves are full of life, with trees and landmarks dotting each one. The landmarks serve a mechanical purpose, as each one along a finished loop counts as a point scored on that loop, but they’re also a delightful way to see the sights along your trails as they’re built.

That takes us to the rules. I’m going to stick to the simplest version of the rules, which excludes the animal tokens; you’ll see why in a little bit. Players pull from the deck of trail cards to build each of the three trails, trying to complete loops to and from their campsites. Colors must match for points to score – red biking trails must begin and end at the red biking camp, for example – but cards can be placed anywhere as long as it’s a legal position adjacent and orthogonal to a player’s existing cards.

It’s best to imagine a grid beneath your ever-growing Trailblazers map, with camps representing a 2×2 square and each trail card taking up 2×1, lengthwise or widthwise. Trail cards can overlap, allowing a player to undo or retrace a line to better fit the cards they’ve been dealt, though this action tends to lead to a compact board that might complete loops faster but can’t easily accomplish the bonus-awarding goals.

Players start with eight random cards in their hand, and all at once the table plays two of them onto their own boards (which will have started with any one of the camps). After playing, the hands of cards are rotated, and players select two more cards from the player to their side. This is a thoughtful balance of individual and competitive play: Most of the active game involves looking at your own trails and making your own choices, but in between those steps is as much gamesmanship and cut-throat choice as you’d like. You can, for example, disrupt your neighbor’s burgeoning river rapids by playing the only two cards in your hand with rivers on them before making the pass, or use the one card in your hand that would complete one of their mid-game goals.

More likely though, at least if you’re anything like my play table, you’re going to be too busy grimacing and groaning at your own spaghetti mess of trails to bother messing much with your opponents. My immediate mental comparison when I opened this game up was to Railroad Ink, a roll-and-write in which you fill in a grid of intersecting roads and rails to maximize your networks and minimize errors. That game, too, leads to a lot of “oh no what have I done” chaos as rounds unfold, but the logic of what you need and the potential consequences of any action are much clearer.

In Trailblazers, a game pitched for players aged 8 and up but that would probably lead to card-throwing frustration from anyone on the low end of that scale, every decision has thorns, and some of those might not be visible until many rounds in the future. The 2×1 card sizes and abstract nature of the scale of what you’re building complicates each placement immensely. One goal may lead you to compact your design while another demands sprawling, and both goals can be flustered by receiving a hand of roundabouts when you need straightaways.

A note on that scale: I think this game’s presentation and compact packaging, lovely as it is, belies how it plays out on a table. Don’t go into this expecting it to fit on the table of your train on the way to the mountainside; Trailblazers is chaotic in size, and depending on how neat and tidy your players are as they frantically blaze their trails, things can get out of hand very quickly. Expect to shove those goal cards further and further to the table’s edge as you carve out more room for your hopeless hiking trail to nowhere.

Anyway, as I mentioned, there’s an entire additional ruleset involving animal tokens that can boost or hinder your scoring as the game progresses. The end result is a game of dastardly complexity with a deceptive chill vibe, something that looks like something a child could enjoy but could instead give an engineering professor fits. The blend is jarring on an initial playthrough, enough so that if I were a part of designer Ryan Courtney’s team, I might have reconsidered some of the detailing to imbue more danger and precarity to the theming, letting the player think of themself as a daredevil as much as a trailblazer while navigating their novel terrain. (Think cliffsides and potholes, jagged rocks in the rapids, or sudden terrifying waterfalls.)

Verdict

If you’re on its wavelength – which might be a bit more devilish than you’re expecting at first glance – Trailblazers has all the mechanical complexity and competitive depth to match tile-placement classics like Carcassonne in a much tidier and colorful package. Some of the parts are fiddly in the effort to compact itself into a fancy travel case, and the game’s tight-knit ruleset and random variation can overwhelm new players, but it’s hard to argue with the satisfaction of a well-made trail or the sleekness of the end result when you zip up the case after a frenetic game or two.

Likes

• delightful packaging and presentation
• deceptively complex
• good mix of interaction and self-contained play
• lots of goal and trail cards means high variation between sessions

Dislikes

• deceptively very complex, to the point of overwhelming
• compact packaging doesn’t track with the sprawling game design
• half-size cards are cute, but annoying in practice
• solo mode objectives are hard to parse; would rather just play a lower-stakes version with no objectives aside from completing loops