Tonight at the shop (Round Table Games in Conshohocken, Pa, USA), Joe the owner brought out Tsuro. I was waiting for a game to get organized when he said "Hey, I've got this great new game you've got to try." I protested that the other game was about to start when he just started putting the pieces down and said "Dude, I could have explained the rules already in the time it took you to say that." Turns out he was right, and we wound up playing a bunch of games through the course of the night.

Overview

One of Tsuro's biggest strengths is that it's really simple. You have a pawn that starts at the edge of the board, and a couple of cards in hand. The cards have paths drawn on them. On your turn you lay down a card in front of your pawn, and it follows the path to the edge of the card. If your pawn ever goes off the board or collides with another player, you lose. Last one standing wins. There's some small details of course (e.g., when the card deck runs out), but you really can explain the whole thing in about a minute. Further, there are very few caveats that have to be explained later, and most people will intuitively understand it very quickly.

Components

Tsuro's components are very nice, another strength. The minimalist Asian theme of the components complements the simplicity of the game well. The cards are thick & stiff, easy to plunk around. While pretty basic, the pawns are an interesting stone-like shapes with an etched dragon pattern that works very nicely with the simple mechanics & art. The real standout, however, is the board. It's very pretty, and a major attraction on the table.

Gameplay

But, now the real crux of the issue: how does it play?

I could be wrong, but it's not clear to me that there's a great deal of strategy in Tsuro. It's true, there are basic trends such as "creep around the edges," "work toward the middle," "avoid others," and "get near others." However, it's not a long game where you can develop a plan, and it's not very clear that your choices have a big effect in the long term. In the short term, however, there is a lot of trying to plan out your path based on the cards in your hands while taking in account what others might do. This might be a potential bottleneck if people sit and crunch all possible paths, but no one seemed to be doing that in our group. It's so fast and random that there's probably no point. So, as a player you're thinking (mostly geometrically, envisioning paths), but not very hard.

Of note: there are some variants around which add some more strategy (including some in the forums here on the 'geek) and are probably worth looking into, though I haven't yet.

Summary

Basically, Tsuro is a very fast, high player-count, light filler game. Games take about ten minutes or less, which is perfect for the complexity of the game. It's simple enough that any longer would grow tedious & random, while any shorter would have little point.

I think a lot of Tsuro's popularity comes from the basic fact that most people like laying tiles & building patterns. It is pretty neat just watching crazy paths spread across the board, and swooping pawns along them when sections are connected. In addition, Tsuro supports a wide range of players (2--8), making it playable by a range of gaming group sizes. It doesn't bog down much with more players either. As long as everyone's playing reasonably there's little downtime, and the games end very fast.

Tsuro is almost perfectly pitched as a filler game: simple rules that can be explained very easily & quickly; wide range of player numbers & fast game times, enabling it to be played while waiting for people to show up; fast play times, with a guaranteed terminal point (no occassional indordinately long games). At $24US it's maybe a little pricey for a filler game of such low complexity. However, you'll probably get a lot of play out of it if you keep it on hand to fill in those gaps that always crop up on game nights. A very interesting first foray by WizKids into pure boardgames.