Postcards is a very relaxed game for 1-4 players. In this game, players cycle around France as they pick up souvenirs and gifts, go camping, and send postcards of the landmarks they visit.
A grand day out
The art style here is pleasant and clear, without being bland. The artwork is stylized with a gentle nostalgia, the postcards especially reminiscent of vintage tourism posters.
Combined with the artwork, each postcard shows where to send them from and how many stamps they need.
Everything else is pretty but precise. The other cards are slightly plain, but this is a perfectly valid compromise to make them as straightforward as possible to use. This clarity extends to making sure that symbols are added to the colours on the Travel cards, making it accessible for colour-blind players.
Postcards is a very relaxed game for 1-4 players. In this game, players cycle around France as they pick up souvenirs and gifts, go camping, and send postcards of the landmarks they visit.
A grand day out
The art style here is pleasant and clear, without being bland. The artwork is stylized with a gentle nostalgia, the postcards especially reminiscent of vintage tourism posters.
Combined with the artwork, each postcard shows where to send them from and how many stamps they need.
Everything else is pretty but precise. The other cards are slightly plain, but this is a perfectly valid compromise to make them as straightforward as possible to use. This clarity extends to making sure that symbols are added to the colours on the Travel cards, making it accessible for colour-blind players.
Components are a mix of good quality cardboard tokens and cards. One thing that you need to be aware of is that the game is a lot bigger than you might expect. The postcards are full-size, and the game board itself unfolds to a surprisingly large 22”x22”. Combined with the number of postcards that you may have in play, this is quite a table hog. This really helps with usability and accessibility, as the board is uncluttered; it just feels like they could have got away with a smaller board.
Be prepared, this is not a coffee table game
Getting ready
Setup is incredibly easy. Each player picks a colour and takes their player token, tents, player board and scoring marker. They are then each dealt a random itinerary which also sets which region they start in. Set out the gift cards, travel cards, and postcards and we’re done.
I like to ride my bicycle
The gameplay has been streamlined in a clever way with the Travel cards. You start with a hand of 5 cards and draw back up to 5 at the end of your turn.
To simplify the rules, rather than saying you have 3 actions per turn, the rule is that you can play 3 travel cards. Now, you don’t have to keep track of how many actions you’ve taken; just count the cards you’ve played. It’s a little thing but appreciated.
Each travel card has one of three action icons and one of four colours. You can play a card for the action on it, or you can play any two cards to do any one action. Any card can instead be played as a stamp, which allows you to add a stamp token to a postcard. This must be on a stamp space of the same colour as the card used, but really helps make it so that any cards you have are useful for something.
Travel cards are multi-functional and clear to understand.
The actions on the travel cards are clear and simple:
Movement (Bicycle) – Move to an adjacent region on the map.
Postcard – Take one of the dealt-out postcards or the top postcard from the deck, then flip it over. These postcards are initially face down so information is limited, but you can see the region they are for and the number of stamps they require to send. Before taking a postcard, if you don’t like the selection, you may discard all three dealt-out postcards and deal out three new ones.
Camp (Tent) – You can take a tent from your itinerary and place it on any unoccupied campsite in your current region. This has two potential bonuses. Firstly, there are bonuses on your itinerary that are triggered when certain tents are removed. More importantly, there are campsite symbols on your unsent postcards. You can place a souvenir token over any spot matching the campsite’s icon and claim the bonus beside it. This can be bonus actions, an extra card play, adding a stamp, or extra points. It gives you an incentive to either hold off on sending postcards or pick up more postcards than you need.
As well as using cards to trigger these actions, you sometimes gain bonus actions from souvenirs and gifts (I’ll talk about these later). You can often pick up multiple movement actions, and this may be tricky to remember, so there are Bicycle tokens you can use to keep track.
Wish you were here
The postcards also have a dual use. The main purpose for collecting postcards is to stamp them and send them. This is the main scoring method and how you end the game. However, it can be worth your while to pick up a few postcards just for their souvenir bonuses. These can turn a simple Camp action into a far more powerful combination of bonuses.
Another great example of clarity of design.
Everything you need to know is there
In order to send a postcard, two things must be true. Firstly, all stamp spaces on the postcard must be filled (higher-scoring postcards require more stamps). Secondly, you must be in the region matching the number of the postcard. At that point you can send as many postcards you have that meet these criteria.
When you send a postcard, as well as scoring for this, you also pick one of the available Gift cards. Some give one-use bonuses that can give you a good boost when you need it. Others are scoring criteria that can give you some important points at the end.
Tourism de France
The gameplay in Postcards is smooth, with the potential of long-term plans but a simple and quick turn structure.
First, the current player plays three travel cards. If they generate bonus actions, then they can use these at any point during their turn. Their turn continues until they’ve played all the travel cards they can, sent any postcards they can, and used any bonus actions they want. At that point they draw new cards (either from the face-up supply or the deck) back up to a hand of 5 cards. The next player clockwise then takes their turn.
When any player sends their 4th postcard, the game continues until everyone has had an equal number of turns. Players then add the scores for the number of locations on their itinerary that they’ve sent a postcard from; 1 point for each unsent postcard they have; and any points scored from Gift cards, and the player who first sent their 4th postcard gets a 3-point bonus. The highest score wins.
Learning to ride
There’s a nice learning curve moving from players racing to the end to them learning to take more time to optimise scoring.
You can rush to add stamps and send postcards; this gets you a 3-point bonus for finishing first and likely catches other players before they can complete their scoring plans. However, if you spend the time camping and collecting souvenirs, you can use these to get more actions so you get more done than you would expect. You also get bonuses for camping in every campsite in a region and sending postcards from your itinerary’s regions.
Speaking from experience, the player rushing to be first to complete 4 postcards has rarely been the actual winner. The winner has more often been the player who diversifies by picking up high-scoring postcards and moving to regions with useful landmarks as they head to the location to send the postcard, along the way collecting bonus actions from camping to get more done each turn. Three good postcards generally beats four okay ones.
I really like that the advantage of taking your time to get the best results does prevent the game always ending too early. That said, these two methods of playing do mean that this relatively simple game can be simplified even more by younger or inexperienced players. As they learn the tricks and combinations that improve efficiency, the game can gradually expand for them. There’s also a Wildlife Wonders expansion included that adds animal postcards; this adds almost nothing to the complexity but increases the play time and makes scoring even more important than racing to finish. I like that this is included for free rather than being sold later.
Interaction is minimal and unlikely to be mean. Other players may take a postcard, card, gift or campsite you wanted, but there are usually enough options around that this is a mild inconvenience. Travel cards are useful either for their action or for their colour, so it’s very rare that you don’t have something useful to do for your turn.
Final thoughts
Overall, Postcards is a light, enjoyable game with just enough options that you can still make plans. Definitely good as a warm-up game, a slightly heavy family game, or a bit of relaxed competition.
