In 2023, Rodrigo Rego and his wife went on a three-week trip through Vietnam and Cambodia, their first long journey after the pandemic. Organizing it had been exhausting, deciding how many days to dedicate to each stop, what was truly worth seeing, and how to travel from one city to another without burning through their budget. While organizing it, nothing came to mind. The idea came later, during the trip, when his mind had finally rested: there's a game in this. The game that emerged is called Abroad, and it chronicles four weeks of travel in Europe.
Rego lives in Rio de Janeiro, has been designing games since 2014, and has seventeen titles to his name, including Savernake Forest for Devir and Superstore 3000 for Space Cowboys. He also organizes pub quizzes, and that passion has found its way into more than one published game, including geography. Abroad, however, was a different matter because, in his own words, everything he had done until then was on a much smaller scale.
So he called Danilo Valente, who lives in Manaus, on the other side of Brazil and in a different time zone. They had met during the pandemic when both had moved their prototypes to digital platforms, and from that distance, Landmarks had already emerged in 2024, nominated for a Golden Geek for best party game. They had already made a game together, in short, and it had gone well. They spent almost six months exclusively on Abroad, and it is the most ambitious project Rego has signed.
The German edition of Abroad was released in September 2025 and sold out its entire first print run before the SPIEL fair in Essen even closed its doors.
In English, the game did not yet exist, and would not for another year, as the international edition only arrived in August 2026 with Portal Games.
Abroad: A Travel Journal in the Italian edition. Image provided by Ghenos Games.
It is published by 1 More Time Games, a Viennese company founded in late 2019 by two former editors, for whom Abroad is only the third title in their catalog after Riftforce and Challengers!. The illustrations are by Christian Schupp, who designs record covers and packaging in Berlin more often than board games.
The personal board is a twenty-eight-day calendar, four weeks from Monday to Sunday, and at the beginning, each square is covered by a disc. Moving doesn't cost days. A plane costs four euros and takes you anywhere, a train costs energy and takes you to the next region, and the calendar remains intact.
You only spend days when you stop to do something, and each day spent leaves the calendar to end up on the map, in the region where you are at that moment. The time you spend in a place becomes your presence in that place, visible to everyone, and at the end of the week, majorities are counted.
Here the game does something that sets it apart from other majority games. The discs left in a region count, of course, but as soon as someone flips one to its hidden side, that region becomes theirs, and the days others spent there cease to matter. The hidden side is called an insider tip.
At the end of the week, each region pays two points to the player with the most insider tips there and one point to the player with the second most. If no one has flipped even one, or if two players have the same number, then the days spent there decide.
Flipping a disc is not automatic, as only certain cards and actions allow it, which makes the tip the most contested resource in the game. In the German edition, it's called Geheimtipp, meaning secret tip.
A curious blend of a demanding optimization game and a feel-good game.
Johanna France, Spiel des Jahres juror, in Spielbox magazine 5/25.
Rego explained how he arrived at it. In majority games, there are usually two levers: how many tokens you place and where you place them. In Abroad, counting happens every week and everyone has exactly seven days to spend, so the first lever disappears, leaving only "where." The insider tip gave him a second one back.
The day discs remain in the region where they were spent. Image provided by Ghenos Games.
At the table, it sounds different. You can spend four days in Scandinavia because you needed to complete an objective, only to see it taken away by someone who spent just one day, the right one, in the place where they found something you didn't know. It's the difference between having been there and having understood it, and Abroad scores that.
Abroad's Europe is not divided into states, but into ten game blocks with names like North, Italy, and Balkans. The acronyms made more than one table laugh, as FBR stands for France-Benelux region. Within those blocks, something disappears. Udo Bartsch, who sits on the Spiel des Jahres jury, noted that Ireland has no internal border and that Luxembourg does not appear at all.
In the same review, Tobias Franke, another juror, wonders how happy Luxembourgers are to find themselves within France. He recognizes, however, that those regions make sense for the game, and his remains the desire for more adherence to reality. And it is Bartsch himself who elsewhere praised Abroad for how it brings people together across borders, in a game where ideology, politics, and travel restrictions count for nothing.
| Culture |
No map is a neutral object Even the publisher, at one point, felt the need to intervene on the BoardGameGeek forum. The message was titled "A travel guide, not a simulation" and clarified that Abroad is an eurogame about travel, not a simulation of contemporary Europe nor a historical commentary. Everyone is right, and precisely for this reason, the matter is interesting. The moment you decide where a line passes, you have already said something, even when you only wanted to make the majorities work. Udo Bartsch's and Tobias Franke's observations on the board's borders are collected in the press review published by the Spiel des Jahres jury on January 20, 2026. |
And the frictionless Europe of Abroad, where crossing a border costs money and fatigue and nothing else, was imagined by two men living in Rio de Janeiro and Manaus. The easiest continent to cross that I've encountered this year was designed by two people who, to actually cross it, have to ask for permission.
In brief — Abroad: A Travel Journal is a board game for 1-5 players, aged 12 and up, lasting approximately 90 minutes. It was designed by Rodrigo Rego and Danilo Valente, illustrated by Christian Schupp, released in 2025 by 1 More Time Games, and published in Italy by Ghenos Games.
Sources · Interview with Rodrigo Rego published by Portal Games in July 2026 · Rodrigo Rego's personal website · The press review of Abroad by the Spiel des Jahres jury, January 2026, which includes Johanna France on Spielbox 5/25, Udo Bartsch and Tobias Franke · Abroad's entry on BoardGameGeek, LadybugMeeple's review and 1 More Time Games' intervention on the forum · Dale Yu's review on The Opinionated Gamers · Portal Games press release, March 2026 · Where sources were not available, I did not fill in with my own words.
Four weeks, twenty-eight days and a continent that someone had to decide how to draw.
The Italian edition is published by Ghenos Games with the title Abroad: Travel Diary, and is in the Frogames catalog.
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