Tsuro (very fast easy to learn game)

This is a game that you can setup and play in ten minutes or less.  And have lots of fun the whole time. Short but sweet. A casual glance at the game makes it look like everything is just random and you just see who is lucky. However, that is not the case. Yes, you can play it fast and more or less randomly … yet you also can spend just an extra 20 seconds and see some strategies to which tile you place and how you place it! There are definitely many strategies involved with Tsuro! Many!

=> BoardGameGeek
=> Tsuro 1pg Rules
=> Phase by Phase Cards (important – I use them all the time) v4

=> Video Playlist

Note: See the end of this article for notes about how to use the Dragon Tile.

How To Play in 1 Minute (Rules Girl):

As usual, Watch It Played explains the game quite well:

And then you can watch him play the game with his two kids:

And … here is where I first found out about this game … in the midst of video talking about 20 Entry Level Games … I queued up the video to the spot where they talk about Tsuro:

And here is Wesley Crusher, um, I mean Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: Next Generation fame) playing Tsuro with three friends, one who just happens to be the son of Gene Roddenberry (they play three quick playing games… but no need to watch the other two :)

A Warning & Final Note: the first two games we played of Tsuro the tiles were sliding all over the board as we tried to move our pawns along the paths. My solution was to draw the same grid pattern on the back of a GripMat, which is a bit stickier than a Neoprene playmat. I think this would work better on a Neoprene playmat but I didn’t have any the correct size! The GripMat that I had was 24×24 inches which is a perfect size for playing Tsuro. Here is how it looks as you start a game with four players:

Note: Another easily fixable issue was the player tokens which are tall and thin and thus were always tipping over (at which point it was hard to remember which path it was on). The solution was to just get another set of player tokens! I got a set of race cars! Now, instead of “paths” the cars are driving down the gray road on their journey! Much easier to explain and much more fun to play this way. You can get small player tokens from many places (even from some of your other games – just borrow them:). But if you want to know, I got our small race car tokens from The Gamecrafter. If you plan on racing your car along the road, check that the front of the token is raised up off the playing board a bit so it doesn’t catch on the edges of the tiles! Also watch the length and width dimensions so that they will “fit” on the Tsuro tile roads!

Note: The Dragon Tile is not played on the board. Instead, whenever a player ends their turn and is to draw a new tile, and there are NO tiles left in the draw pile, that player gets the Dragon Tile. Then later in the game, if a player is eliminated, all their tiles become the new draw pile and the person with the Dragon Tile takes one of those tiles (even if it is not their turn). Then the player after them would take a tile if they had less than 3, and then the player after that. But if the draw pile runs out (again), the player who was supposed to get a tile, gets the Dragon Tile. If every player was able to replenish their hands with 3 tiles, then the Dragon Tile is set aside until it is needed again (when a player cannot draw a tile at the end of their turn).