Tokaido: Crossroads expansion review

You've walked the Tokaido road from Kyoto to Tokyo many times. You've fallen in love with the gentle and relaxed pace that it has offered you and now you want more. You have decide that you might look into an expansion for the game Tokaido but don't know if it would be good for you. Well you've come to the right place.

I have reviewed Tokaido before and if you want to add something extra to the game you can get the Crossroads expansion. With the expansion you get new characters to play, and whenever you land on a space you can choose between two actions instead of one. You can see the cherry blossom instead of painting, gamble instead of working at the farm, get a legendary item instead of just going to the normal gift shop and so on. Basically there is a whole bunch more stuff to do.

So, I must say that the new characters have much more powerful abilities, which makes them feel really exciting and fun to play, and give them each a unique personality, although this is traded for less staring money. One of my personal favourite added character is 'Nampo the gourmet' who gets extra victory points for eating expensive food or 'Gotozaemon the souvenir seller' who gets money from selling things every time he lands on a painting space but starts the game broke. All of these are enriched by beautiful art which really makes the characters come alive. They feel as if each of them has had a lot more though put into them than in the original game and so are a excellent addition.

While giving players so many new options can be interesting and exciting, I often found that it took away from the easy going feel of the game, as you had to think about double the options than what you had to in the original game. Having to think about legendary items which offer new effects, when to play a amulet card or how to effectively use calligraphy cards to get the most points just adds a bit too much in my opinion and disturbs the relaxed flow of the game. I wish that instead of making completely new mechanics like calligraphy or lucky amulets, the expansion built of what was already there maybe adding more people to meet (as the selection of people you can meet is pretty repetitive).

A interesting new addition to the game is gambling, which instead of getting three guaranteed coins by working at the farm, lets you pay two coins and roll the fortune die to see if you could double, triple or even quadruple those coins or just lose them all. This can create great moments as you roll the dice and turn two coins into eight but most of the time it is a bit anti-climatic. This is because half of the time when rolling the die you would actually be better of just working in the farm and for the rest of the time it only gives you one or two coins extra. Instead of feeling like an all or nothing tension fest, it feels like sometimes all or sometimes nothing, but most of the time uneventful.

I do enjoy legendary items though, which you can choose to take one and pay for its cost instead of going to the normal shop. The legendary items each have cool effects which are powerful and fun to collect but not complicated in the slightest and really just help add to the souvenir system which is already there. Personally, I particularly liked the 'Shodo' and 'Emaki' which gave you an extra point for every souvenir you had now and carrying forward, which is super satisfying as now you get even more points for souvenirs. Although do be aware, if someone collects both, it is almost too powerful as each item they acquire will give them two extra points plus the ones it would have normally got them.

Overall, the Tokaido Crossroads expansion gives a bunch of new ways to play and things to do in return for taking away some of that relaxed feel of the original game. I think my family will probably sometimes play with it but for when we just want to walk down the Tokaido road and not have to worry about anything else, we might revert to the purity that the original game holds.