• Designer: Masayuki Ikegami
• Publisher: itten
• Players: 1-6
• Age: 8+
• Time: 15 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Tokyo Highway Driver’s License is a stand-alone speed matching game for players who are familiar with the rules of Tokyo Highway, as well as for those looking to learn the rules of Tokyo Highway. Test your abilities in recognizing the roads and car placements in this quiz-style game which consists of 20 cards. Can you solve the answer the quickest?

Shuffle the highway cards to randomly create the road conditions. Players need to examine the highway layout, and be the fastest to answer correctly to earns points. Simply flip over a new card to reveal the next layout prompt! The player with the most points after several rounds is the winner.

Tokyo Highway Driver’s License is a speed puzzle game. The deck of 16 cards is shuffled and placed in the center of the table, surrounded on all four sides by on-ramp cards, each with a different colored car on it.

The top card of the deck is removed and flipped over – the reverse side of that card will have one of the four colors on it – this is the target car for the round. The card on top of the deck will have a jumble of roads on it.

Now, it’s a speed game. Players race to find the highway on ramp of the matching color, tracing its highway to the final road. Then, they need to count how many conditions the final road satisfies: When it is the only road to pass under another highway OR when it is the only road to pass over another highway.

Note that it is possible for the final road to meet both conditions, and possibly meet either or both more than once.

When someone thinks they have the answer, they blurt it out and then flip the card over. The dots on the back of the card give the correct answer. If the blurter was correct, he keeps the card as a scoring piece. If he is wrong, he does not collect the card AND must return a previously collected scoring piece.

Continue until the draw pile is empty. The player with the most points at the end wins.

My thoughts on the game

Well, it’s a speed puzzle game – that should tell you what my rating is going to be. Tokyo Highway Driver’s License is a quick playing game where you have to find the correct terminal popsicle stick from the jumble on the card and then process how many times it is the only stick to either go above or be above another stick, but uniquely.

It is an interesting puzzle, though the time pressure forces you to push your limits and solve it as quickly as possible – leading to many errors. The cards are cleverly set up so that if you flip the card over correctly, the answer will be given to you on the reverse side.

As with most (well, really all) speed puzzle games, the majority of the rounds in the game will be won by the player who just “sees” it faster. You may only be five percent faster at seeing it, but there is no reward for second place, so the faster player gets most of the points. Sure, the game tries to balance it out by making a player return a scored point if they make a mistake – but the fact remains that people who can’t process things that fast (like me) will spend the entire game unable to answer in time – or they are forced to simply yell out a number as soon as the card is flipped and then hope that their answer is correct.

The game comes in a nice portable sleeve, and it could easily be held in a pocket or purse – making this great for a quick play while at a restaurant or possible on a tray table in a plane. The artwork and style definitely fit into the theme set by the base Tokyo Highway game as well.

If you’re the sort of person who likes these speed games, you may find this a nice challenge.

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor