How Let’s Go! To Japan turned a cancelled COVID vacation into a hit board game
The board game Let’s Go! To Japan was inspired by a canceled trip due to COVID-19. Designer Josh Wood turned his travel plans into a successful game, which led to a sequel, Let’s Go! To France, launching on Kickstarter. The new game incorporates insights from Wood's actual trip to France, enhancing the travel experience for players.
- ▪Josh Wood had to cancel his trip to Japan in April 2020 due to COVID-19 lockdowns.
- ▪He created Let’s Go! To Japan as a way to cope with the pandemic, which was released in 2024.
- ▪The sequel, Let’s Go! To France, begins crowdfunding on May 19, 2026, after Wood's trip to France for inspiration.
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| Original publisher | Polygon |
| Canonical URL | https://www.polygon.com/lets-go-to-france-board-game-kickstarter-interview/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 14:00:19 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-19T14:04:57.719Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-19T14:04:57.719Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | -bYdVZ6irJCq |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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Follow Followed Like Thread Link copied to clipboard Add us on By Sam Nelson Published May 19, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT Board Games The Let’s Go! To Japan sequel Let’s Go! To France lands on Kickstarter May 19 { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": "1", "name": "Home", "item": "https://www.polygon.com/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position":"2", "name": "Board Games", "item": "https://www.polygon.com/board-games/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position":"3", "name": "How a cancelled COVID vacation inspired a hit board game series", "item": "https://www.polygon.com/lets-go-to-france-board-game-kickstarter-interview/" } ] } Related The OG PlayStation era gets an overdue comeback in this stylish new TTRPG Pokémon TCG's new…
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