Bus & Stop Review – Discover the true joy of riding the bus

Board gamers love a bit of public transport in their games, so today’s entry in the Japanese Game Festival (日本のゲーム祭り) ought to pique some interest. It’s the turn of Bus & Stop from Saashi & Saashi. While calling it a board game was a bit of a misnomer, as there’s no board involved, there’s no denying it’s a brilliant little set-collection game.

The idea of the game is simple. You have an imaginary bus in front of you with room for 10 passengers. There’s always a queue of five cards (people) at the bus stop (or card market if you prefer), and each person has two things you need to pay attention to. They’re one of five different types (businessman, tennis player, mother & child, student, elderly person), indicated by an icon in the corner of the card, and they’re also one of five colours.

On your turn, you choose a colour and take all of the cards of that colour, adding the passengers to your bus. If you can’t fit them all in, you can’t take them. The only exceptions are the old people, who immediately get off at the next stop, apparently. The rules explain it as them preferring not to travel far, so you just flip each one face down to score a point at the end of the game.

Instead of picking passengers up, you can drop them off. To do so, you choose a group or matching types (not colours) on your bus, take a scoring card, and pop the delivered cards on the scoring card. The scoring card indicates how many people were dropped off and how many points they’re worth. The scoring for passengers is sort of exponential. For instance, the points for dropping off 4, 5, 6, or 7 businessmen are 6, 10, 14, and 20, respectively. Hanging on for big numbers to deliver means relying on being able to fill a nearly full bus, and hoping that the other players don’t exhaust the scoring cards for the type you’re saving for.

The result is a ultimately a game which combines set collection with a race. The game ends when there aren’t enough passengers to refill the queue, or only six scoring cards in total remain. Knowing when to cash-in is the key to doing well. I know this, because I’m terrible at it and almost always lose.

Final thoughts

The strapline for this review is ‘Discover the true joy of riding the bus’ because the rules sheet for Bus & Stop contains one of my favourite paragraphs from any game. The section about the Skedaddle action, an action that lets you offload a passenger when somebody else drops passengers off, has this in it:

“Skedaddling represents a passenger choosing to get off at an unplanned stop, impulsively. This is the true joy of riding a bus”

I highlight this part because it’s whimsical and cute, and that’s the same feeling which pervades every part of Bus & Stop. Takako Takarai’s art is once again at the heart of this feeling, leaning heavily into the feel of the games of Happy Families you might have played when you were young. There’s a similar feel to Bus & Stop. It’s light, easy, happy and friendly.

There’s still enough here to keep the gamers among you happy. It’s still a ‘proper’ game, for want of a better word, but in the same breath you can happily play this with kids and grandparents, and everyone will have a good time. Just don’t go into it expecting some kind of sneaky game with layers and layers of depth after 20 or 30 plays. What you see is what you get.

How to buy it

You’re likely to have trouble finding Bus & Stop outside of Japan or bigger conventions. It’s another of Saashi & Saashi’s games without international distribution. UK gamers may be able to get a copy from Travel Games when it comes in stock, but otherwise it’s one to go on the wishlist for Saashi completionists.

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