Trails (a Parks game)

We broke open the Trails game today.  The game board is a series of 7 big cards: Trail Head, 5 location cards then Trail End.  There are little cubes in 3 different color for resources, a deck of Photo cards with point values, and a deck of Badges with point values and extra icons.

It seemed simple enough, just hike back and forth across the cards and take the resources (or photo card) shown on the card you land on.  If you land on the card with the bear, roll the die to move the bear to another card and get those resources too.  There are a few other bits, like spending your canteen of water to move to any card -- it refills when you get back to the Trail Head later on.

When you hit the Trail Head or Trail End, you have a chance to buy Badge cards for the resources shown.  Each time you land on Trail End, you move the sun one card to the left and flip that card to the nighttime side.  It's not too complicated.

Except that it feels more complicated than it needs to be.  The art is top notch, and all the pieces feel right, but it was just annoying having to constantly check the rulebook to see what each thing means.  I did like the tiers of scoring at the end: check your photos and badges to see who has found the most birds - that person gets the special Bird Chip which is worth 4 points.  Then some of the badges had extra resource icons, which really felt pointless (I had one that got one extra point for each green cube, so that made sense) so we just ignored those and added up the points. I guess the extra acorns would be worth having if you had a badge that counted them.

After the first game, I figured the second game would run more smoothly, but got a solid "let's do something else" from Anne.  

So I wonder if I can come up with a solitaire version, maybe just go for the highest point total after the sun has completed its course?

It just felt like more of a chore than a game.  None of the steps were amusing, just look at icons and try to compare them to actions.