Bus & Stop
- Board's Eye View
- May 2
- 2 min read
Designed by Saashi and published by Saashi & Saashi, Bus & Stop is a light pick-up-and-deliver card game where the 2-5 players will be collecting passengers and dropping them off at their various destinations. Art is by Takako Takarai.
At the bus stop there are always five passengers waiting to be picked up. This is, in effect, a market display of cards drawn from the deck of 100 passenger cards. Passenger cards come in five different coloured backgrounds and each passenger card shows one of four destinations. On your turn you either pick up from the bus stop all the passengers of any one colour and add them to your double-decker bus (a notional 5 x 2 grid tableau in front of you) or you drop off passengers from your bus to one of the destination cards, taking the card and flipping it to show your score. Your bus cannot hold more than 10 passengers and you can't ordinarily drop off passengers at a destination and take that destination card unless you have at least the minimum number of passengers on board that are shown on that destination card.
For some reason senior citizens don't take up space on your bus but when you pick one up their card goes into a separate pile where it'll score you a point at the end of the game. And when another player drops passengers off at a destination and claims the top card from that destination, other players can opt for one of their passengers with that same destination to 'skedaddle' - again to a separate pile where they'll score 1 point apiece. The skedaddle action can be useful as a way of freeing up space on your bus.
The number of points you score for a destination increases substantially depending on the number of passengers you are dropping off; so, for example, you'll get just 3 points for dropping off two passengers at the tennis courts but a whopping 16 points if you've six tennis players to drop off there. This is a game where a player is more likely to win by collecting sets of passengers with shared destinations rather than lots of small drop offs.
Bus & Stop is a well-designed, easy-to-play family friendly game that plays in a filler-length 15-20 minutes. We're just worried about how those seniors are being treated!
