Matthew BaileyNow that half-term is over and I’m well and truly in full-on GCSE Design and Technology deadline mode, the reviews have slowed down slightly. But I’m still extremely keen to finish telling you about some of the travel games we’ve been playing recently!
Game 9 of our travel games log is Pier 18, an extremely small card game—just 18 cards! This is a game so tiny you could literally keep it in your wallet, not just in a bag. Because of its incredible smallness, it’s the one we take out when we’re not sure if we’ll actually need a travel game and don’t fancy carrying a bag with one inside. As a result, it pretty much lives in my glove box, ready to grab whenever the situation calls for it.
Everything in Pier 18 happens with just those 18 cards, and it’s a really quick and simple game. You’re playing as a Victorian pier builder, trying to create the greatest seaside pier. To start, you shuffle the pier cards and place them in the middle of the table. Each player gets a pier entrance card, which is both your starting point and your personal objective card, giving you a special scoring condition.
The game itself is pretty straightforward. Each turn, you lay out a number of cards in the centre (one more than the number of players), then take turns drafting a card and adding it to your pier. You can place your new card however you like—overlapping, tucking it under, whatever works—as long as it all stays connected to your original pier entrance. The idea is to position each section so that the different icons—representing visitors, workers, and attractions—line up in the most efficient way possible to maximise your score. On top of that, at the end of each round, the best-built pier will get extra points from a patron.
There are four main ways to score points:
- Poets: You get one star per two poets anywhere on your pier. A solid, reliable way to earn points.
- Fishermen: You score one star per fisherman on the side of your pier with the most fish. So if you’ve got six fish on the right and three on the left, you’ll score six points.
- Lovers: These romantic types earn you two stars per couple, but only if they have no other characters within two spaces—because, let’s be honest, people need a bit of privacy for a good canoodle.
- Flower sellers: You get one star per other character standing next to a flower seller, leaning into that whole “Lovers on the Pier” theme.
Because you’re playing with such a tiny deck and only a handful of cards, every choice matters. If you’re prone to analysis paralysis, this might melt your brain a little as you try to optimise your score. But if you just take it as a quick, breezy game, it’s a really enjoyable puzzle. And because it’s so fast, it’s easy to just shuffle up and play again straight away.
The game continues until everyone’s pier is fully built, at which point you total up the scores. You get points based on which patrons backed you, the icons on your pier that match scoring conditions, and whether you managed to pull off your personal objective. The player with the highest score wins!
I really like the artwork on the cards—it’s charming and fits the theme perfectly. I also love that the whole game fits in a box the same size as the deck itself, with all the rules printed on the box and handy reminders on the back of every card. While Pier 18 doesn’t have the most depth—and I wouldn’t have said no to a slightly bigger-box version with a bit more to it—its simplicity is exactly what makes it such a great travel game.
This isn’t my absolute favourite from our travel log, but it’s definitely one of the most portable. You can take it literally anywhere, and that’s its biggest selling point. If you want a tiny, clever little game that you can always have on hand, this one is a winner.
