Trekking Through History Review – Revisiting Humanity’s Greatest Hits

Disclaimer: Trekking Through History was provided for free by VR Distribution, although the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

Growing up in school we had to take history lessons, my least favourite subject after geography. Modern history I enjoyed, but the Romans and Greeks? No thanks.

It wasn’t until I had an hour’s commute to university that I found podcasts, one in particular was Hardcore Histories with Dan Carlin. Who I found has the superpower of turning these boring stories of ancient civilizations into captivating tales of wonder. It ignited my interest in anything before the 1900’s.

So when I saw the cover and blurb of Trekking Through History, a board game about plotting a tour through humanity’s greatest achievements, I couldn’t say no.

How to play

Imagine yourself as a travel agent, researching hotels, flights and locations. Now, instead of places around the world, imagine doing that through all of history.

In Trekking Through History, you are a time travel agent plotting out the perfect vacation to the past.

Over the course of three rounds, you draft historic event cards intending to collect victory points by filling in an itinerary.

Each event provides an experience, such as meeting a famous person, seeing a once-in-a-lifetime event, witnessing the birth of technology, or being in the crowd of societal change. Meanwhile, each itinerary requires specific amounts of experience to unlock more victory points.

Beyond collecting experience tokens, you’re also trying to pick up events in chronological order. So if you picked up the Carve Intricate reliefs at Angkor Wat card from 1150, the next card you’d want should be 1150 or later.

The more cards you’re able to string together in order, the more points you get. Although, unless you’re luck itself, you’re likely going to have to break your chain sooner or later.

This causes you to start a new chain of chronological cards.

The last thing you need awareness of is how long the event card takes. Is it just tea with Marco Polo, or are you travelling the Silk Road with him?

You’ll find how many hours each event takes at the bottom left of the card. However, you only have 12 hours to spend each round. Furthermore, the turn order is determined by whoever’s spent the least amount of time so far.

So although drafting a 5-hour card might seem like a good idea. You probably won’t get another turn for a while. Especially, if another player starts snapping up 1-hour events.

After everyone’s spent 12 hours in the round, you add all the points gathered from their itineraries. Then, once three rounds are complete, you combine this score with the points players gained from their chronological lines to find the winner.

So much passion put into the cards

Trekking Through History is a beautiful board game. The colour palette is warm and easy on the eyes. So too are the illustrations that bring historical events to life.

However, the love for history doesn’t stop there.

Each card comes with a blurb on the back describing the event, stoking your curiosity and encouraging you to learn more.

For instance, I learnt about the art of Suffrajitsu from the Practice Suffrajitsu card. When Edith Garrud, a jiu-jitsu instructor, taught women to defend themselves during the Scotland women’s rights movement. How cool is that?!

Trekking Through History is filled with events like this that often don’t make it onto your favourite podcast. Sometimes that’s because they’re obscure events, other times it’s because they aren’t based on Western history.

One example of this is the Command a pirate armada with Zheng Yi Sao card. Detailing the Chinese pirate who took over her husband’s pirate empire in the South China Sea.

Now while most of the event cards focus on the positive achievements of humanity (avoiding the World Wars completely) it doesn’t shy away from some darker subjects. Notably the event card detailing the role of Harriet Tubman in the Civil War.

An important historical figure, but a little out of place in a game for a lighter game.

Still, there’s so much passion and detail put into these event cards that history buffs will love all the imagery and tidbits provided. While you and I will instead enjoy learning about some of the weird and impressive events of the past 40,000 years.

It’s one I want to keep for family night

Putting the loving showcase of history to one side. Trekking Through History is a family-weight game with a wonderful conundrum at its core.

Each turn you weigh up the tokens you’ll collect, the hours you’ll spend, and what year the event card took place. Hoping it’s later than your previously drafted card.

Being a lighter board game, this is not a complex decision to make. But surprisingly, I always found two or three options to chew on before I could comfortably select a card.

Rarely do you get a card that satisfies all three of your wants. More likely there will be an early event card that doesn’t give the tokens you need. Or a card with the perfect set of tokens, but so expensive in time that it doesn’t feel worth it.

These trade-offs always left me wondering what to do. Thankfully, there are time crystals to help with your decision-making.

You receive these as a reward now and again and they let you reduce the time-cost of a card. Letting you pick up an event card costing five hours for three.

Still, this is a really fun conundrum to ponder. Plus having the turn order determined by the player who spent the least time is a great wrinkle that gets you thinking beyond the cards and components.

So, on the whole, I came away really enjoying Trekking Through History.

However, on repeated plays, I didn’t get the same satisfaction. While the central drafting mechanic is great, it doesn’t change much from game to game. So even though I’m not tired of it after six plays, I can see myself eventually losing interest.

In saying that, there is an advanced mode introducing different modifications to each round. But I found these didn’t go far enough to rekindle the same interest I had when I first played.

Yet, even though I came away thinking I wouldn’t continue bringing Trekking Through History to play with my board gaming friends. It’s one I want to keep around for family night and for teaching my son about the history of the world.