Why Tsuro was one of the first modern board games I purchased, I have no idea. I remember it intrigued me, but I don’t recall why. It’s simplicity? It’s box art? It’s price? It’s a fairly unique game, so maybe that had something to do with it. After all, the purchase was made well before my realization that uniqueness in the tabletop space is frequently out of alignment with quality. Case in point: Tsuro itself. This is not a good game, not even close. About the nicest thing I can say about Tsuro is that it’s inoffensive. But oh wait, it’s a game designed by a white dude that draws aesthetic and thematic ties to ancient Chinese philosophy for marketing purposes. And oh no, in the introduction of the rulebook it even claims the game “represents the classic quest for enlightenment.” It’s 2019 yo, some woke somebodies out there must be outraged! Personally, however, there’s another passage in the rulebook I find far more offensive: the one that declares Tsuro a “masterful blend of strategy and chance.” Which, this being a board game review and not a Twitter rant, is the passage I’ll be addressing today.
Let’s cut to the chase, Tsuro is so shallow you can practically exhaust the depths of its possibility space after only a brief explanation of its rules. So let’s do just that. Tsuro is a tile-laying game played on a large square grid. Players are dealt three tiles each, then place their pawns on their chosen starting point around the grid. On these tiles are four different paths that connect the four edges together in various ways. On a player’s turn, they place a tile in front of their pawn in any orientation they wish then move their pawn to the end of the path they’ve created. Sometimes your placement will connect several tiles and you end up moving your pawn quite a ways. If a placed tile also extends another player’s path, that player’s pawn is moved as well. If at any time a player’s path leads them off the edge of the board they are eliminated from the game. The goal is to be the last player standing.
So get to the center of the board and avoid the other players as best you can. There is nothing more to it. Every game of Tsuro plays out exactly the same way. At first people avoid each other as they make their way to the center of the board. Then after a few rounds the board gets crowded with tiles and people start getting eliminated through no fault of their own. You don’t know what tiles anyone else has, so it’s all guess work. It is seriously impossible to trace the reason for your failure back to an actual mistake or poor play. How can a self-purported “masterful blend of strategy and chance” have decisions that are almost completely irrelevant to your performance? Such spurious posturing has no place in a rulebook. Let your sponsored YouTube review channels cover that.
Despite all this negativity, I get why Tsuro is (or at least was) popular. It’s unique, extremely easy to teach, and zipping the pawns around the paths feels like going on a little tabletop roller-coaster. It has a highly flexible player count, and most people’s initial reaction to it are positive. At some point though, no matter how inexperienced of a board game player you are, you are going to realize how unfulfilling the game is. All player decisions and interactions feel totally arbitrary. The only way the game works is as a metaphor for the alternating futility and fortuity of existence. So in some strange way maybe Tsuro “represents the classic quest for enlightenment” after all.
Tsuro gets a rating of TWO out of FIVE, indicating it is NOT RECOMMENDED.