Not all games need to have direction confrontation and you have already seen that if you’ve been following the list. Sometimes it is about figuring out the best way to use what you are given. Avenue is a game like that where it rewards players who find the best use of the resources given. Players are attempting to link icons on the map to the cities drawn on the map. There are also some castle in the corner that can also get you some points.

Each turn one player will flip over a card that represents the road the players can draw that round. You can never use a spot twice or erase something already drawn. Each road is very specific so you can’t rotate the road either. Sometimes that road is not terribly useful to you in which case you need to find somewhere on your map to put it that is going to be the least damaging or maybe even helpful later in the game!

One of the tricks though is you don’t know which towns are going to score and in what order the ones that do score will come up. Instead of drawing a road, one per round you can look at what town is going to be next to score. This can assist you in figuring out how to plan for the future which is super important.

Challenges abound in Avenue, which is great seeing other people can’t bring challenges to you. One of the biggest issues you will run into the game is it is not good enough to do great in each round but you have to do better each round or you will take a hefty penalty. If your score in the current round isn’t better than the previous one than your score for that round turns into a -5 instead of what it was before which can be really damaging to your total end game score.

We have played Avenue a ton of times and now we have been playing Kokoro: Avenue of the Kodama which is a new version of the game that adds more variability. The game is quick and simple to teach and play. It is always a blast to talk amongst each other and see how others are using the roads we are given. At the end of the game all of the players will likely have very different maps. Definitely give our #53 a try!