Busy Buses 2024

A game of matching bus, route, and driver cards in order to collect the most passengers.

You and your fellow players are new trainees learning to co-ordinate the buses in Reading. You have a depot full of brightly painted buses, a large stack of routes, and your driver colleagues. Each bus card shows one of the seven different colours or a rainbow replacement bus (wild card). Each route card is one of the seven routes or the big map of everything (wild card). Each driver can drive three different routes — but there are no wild cards because all the drivers are very careful. In the middle of the table are four different bus stops, at which passengers are waiting. You collect passengers by matching a bus card, a route card, and a driver card to the colour on the passenger card. The player with the most passengers at the end of the game wins.

Busy Buses was co-designed by children at a primary school in Reading. At its heart, it is a simple game. Collect the cards, match the cards, pick up passengers. However, players can pick up multiple passengers, so sometimes it’s worth waiting around, especially in a two player game. Players can also pick up an additional card by discarding matching cards in their hand, which could be a risky strategy, especially if you can’t remember what has already been discarded. In short, this is primarily aimed at children aged between 6 and 12 years old, but with enough interest to capture the interest of adults too.

—description from the publisher