About
Overview
Hike It! is a heavily themed, mid-weight, strategy-based tabletop board game that offers solo, competitive, and team options where every game is its own unique adventure.
Hike It! puts you deep into the Great Smoky Mountains with just your pack and your wits. You will compete for experiences, scenic spots, skills, camps & gear – while overcoming challenges like injuries, dehydration, exhaustion, bad weather & bears.
Hike your hike by choosing your gear, planning your route, and building your skill sets to make it back to your trailhead.
Hike It! is a gritty game of survival in the vast and unforgiving wilderness that will challenge your decision-making, push you to adapt your plans, and test your outdoor skills on the trail.
Hike It! uses a mixture of action selection, set collection, Resource Management, Victory Points, Events, and Push Your Luck, with a touch of Trading and Take That. The game supports 1-4 players and takes around 30-120 minutes to play.
At the beginning of the game, each hiker is randomly given three scenic waypoints across the map that they must visit during their trek. All hikers start their adventure by packing the gear they wish to bring, choosing their optional Side Hikes (objectives), and selecting their starting trailhead. Once the hike begins, each hiker will take turns challenging the weather, moving towards their destinations, and overcoming events and obstacles that will present themselves during the trip. Throughout the game, hikers can stop at camps to collect more gear, find water sources to refill low levels of H20, claim scenic spots across the map, and build individual skills that will empower the hiker to succeed on their journey.
The game has a sense of player-elimination without the actual elimination part. Should you fail to make it back to your trailhead – due to poor trail decisions, your hiker will be rescued from the park and you will return to the game as an aggressive bear chasing down the remaining hikers on the board.
Once all hikers are back to their trailhead, or rescued from the park, all players add up their total experience points from the scenic spots they claimed, skill set tokens they acquired, and the number of remaining health on their health track (also including any side hike and trailhead bonuses).
The hiker with the most experience points wins the day!
The Origin
My name is TJ Swing, I live in Ohio, USA, I’m an avid hiker and a board game enthusiast. I went on my first hike/backpack trip back in 2014 ago in the Great Smoky Mountains, and was hooked ever since. Over the past decade I have backpacked in 8 different states including Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Bottom line, I love hiking and think about it more than a person should.
The problem was when I wasn’t hiking, there wasn’t really a way to capture that feeling of being out in the wild, overcoming challenges, and getting that sense of accomplishment. I tried a few of the other hiking or backpacking themed games out there, and as good of a game as they may be, they really didn’t capture the true essence of a multi-day hiking trip. I’m talking about the grind, the grit, the fear, the excitement, the stress, and the shear joy of completing a challenging hike.
So 4 years ago I began playing around with the idea of making my own, and here we are.
The Designers
This is TJ’s first game, and has taken him and his team over four years to fully develop. TJ also enjoys disc golfing, binging YouTube, and rooting for the University of Tennessee Volunteers (Go Vols!).
Ron enjoys hiking and rockhounding in his home province of Nova Scotia.
