Grand Canyon Adventure (2007)

This was a big, heavy box with all three decks still in their original wrapping.  Even the two dice were in a little plastic slip.  It is from 2007 and appears to an official product for the Grand Canyon park, originally at GrandCanyonGame.com but the site is long gone.

It has a BIG heavy game board with a gorgeous detailed map of the Grand Canyon on the non-playing side.  Wow.  Absolutely no reason for it, other than to add historical detail and production value.  It was a wonderful map, but then you flip over the board and start setting up.

There are Canyon Cards with obstacles to overcome, and Gear Cards that help you overcome them.  There are 10 locations to visit, each with a stack of cards.  The goal is to pick any starting location and get around the board to get a card from all 10 locations.  What makes it more interesting that a simple roll-and-move game is that you roll two dice on the river and one die on land.  And the river is one-way, no going upstream with your die rolls.  A bunch of spaces will have you stuck for a while, and others have you spin a spinner to see what happens.

The rules are on the inside of the box lid.  They specifically say that effect written on the spaces only apply if you land there by rolling dice, so if a space or spinner sends you to a space that says "Back 2" or "Canyon Card", those effects don't happen.  Of course, we thought about playing a chain-reaction variant where one thing can lead to another and another.  We held back for now.

The Canyon Cards and Gear Cards are very well balanced.  The Canyon Card might say your shoes are falling apart, "Counter with Trusty Boots", and if you have Trusty Boots in your pile of Gear Cards you can spend it and avoid whatever penalty the Canyon Card said.  Though it's usually just "Back 1" or "Back 2."

There are also some Helipads on the board.  You can go to one of those and roll a 1 or 6, or spend 5 Gear Cards to hop a helicopter to any other Helipad on the map, and there's one right at the top of the river.

There are way too many spins for my liking.  The Location cards had historic notes and photos, with a bit too much reading after the first few cards.  Some location cards give you a Gear Card, some don't.

An interesting detail is the idea of "sticky spaces" where you can't go past them and miss them.  The Helipads are sticky spaces, and so are any locations where you don't already have the matching Location card, so you won't just roll and run past them and have to keep trying again.  That's good.  There is one annoying bit where reaching the last Location (which has to be the same as the Location you started on) you need to roll the exact count.  That just delays the last move, and you sit there where I needed a 3 and Anne needed a 2, and so on.

This is a really well designed, high-grade piece of work.  Even the player pieces: they're not just plastic pawns but almost comically large collectible animals figures.

Near the end of the rules, it says you can also ignore the goal of getting all 10 Location cards and just do whatever challenge you want.  So, you could just race down the river.  Or, since it reminded me a little of Outdoor Survival with no health bar and actual paths to follow, I can picture a "Rescue" scenario where you put a penny somewhere on the board for each player, far from their starting space, and say there are hikers lost in the Park, and the first player to reach a penny and bring it back to their base is the winner. 

I see a lot of options here.  We might also try it without the annoying spinner.  Nobody needs that much randomness.

Thumbs way up.