The Most Fun Board Game to Play This Holiday Is Trekking the National Parks

If you think a board game about visiting America’s national parks sounds lame as hell, please know that I understand where you’re coming from. And yet, Trekking the National Parks: The Family Board Game is the greatest game I own—seriously, you can chuck my Nintendo Switch into the Grand Canyon for all I care.

I’m exaggerating (a little), but Trekking is legitimately a great game, perhaps because it’s so wholesome that it transcends irony, and you and your fellow players will find yourselves extremely invested in making sure you get to Yosemite before any rival campers. Instead of celebrating the excess of capitalism and ruining your relationships with a 14-hour game of Monopoly, might I suggest you instead pretend to explore nature and learn some fun facts along the way?

As the inside of the box explains, Trekking was created by a game designer, Charlie Bink, when his parents, who love visiting the national parks and playing board games, suggested that Charlie make a game combining the two. The inside of the box features a picture of Charlie’s parents holding up a little banner in American Samoa to celebrate having visited (what was then) all 59 national parks, which should give you some idea of how quaint the whole game feels. The game itself is legit, though. The box is pretty big, featuring a large, high-quality board that unfolds several times to reveal an illustrated map of the United States, with most of the national parks marked as stops.

The gameplay is quite simple, actually, even though the game was a winner of a Mensa award, which really just adds to its endearing lameness. Your goal is to visit national parks, and you gain points either by claiming specific goal parks that are drawn out of a deck or by collecting little colored stones whenever you visit any park. Whoever has the most or second most of each color of stones at the end of the game gets points.

On each person’s turn, they can perform two actions out of the following: claim or occupy one of the parks, draw a card, or move. The cards all feature a number and a color, and you need to spend cards to move (letting your little wooden hiker travel a number of spaces equal to the number of cards you play) and to claim a park (claiming Redwood National Park requires a green card and a yellow card, for instance). This essentially means you need to be careful with your resources. Do you stay in one place, literally camped out while you burn your turns drawing cards that will allow you to move or claim parks? Or do you keep moving, collecting stones but always running short on the resources that might allow you to claim Joshua Tree before somebody else does?

The only other variable is a handful of “Major Parks,” the A-list parks that even most indoor people know about. Camping out in the Everglades or Denali will grant your camper a special ability, like moving an extra space or exchanging any two cards for one wild card. Other than that, though, there aren’t any bells or whistles. It’s not a complex game. It’s a game about visiting national parks.

Trekking won a Parents’ Choice Award, so it’s not not for children, but that’s part of its charm. The best way to play Trekking is to just totally give yourself over to it. When somebody claims a park, make them read the bit of trivia on the card. Did you know that Michigan’s Isle Royale National Park is “the largest island on Lake Superior [and] it’s the home of the longest continuous study of a predator/prey relationship (wolf and moose), spanning six decades beginning in 1958?” Neither did I, until I played Trekking. Learning is fun!

The world is complicated, online is hell, technology will be the downfall of society, and everything is just too much. Why not spend 30 to 60 minutes playing this extremely lovely, fun, and lame game about visiting national parks? It’s not quite as refreshing a balm for the soul as, say, actually visiting Yellowstone, but the chance that you’ll be mauled by a bear is much, much lower.

From a Norman Reedus hiking simulator, to a game about being a horrible goose, 2019 was an exemplary year for video games.

Originally Appeared on GQ