In Daytrip players take a short trip to a new city and race to visit the 16 exciting attractions surrounding their personal city grid. These attractions include classic tourist sites such as a ”Museum” and a ”Theatre” and more quirky locations including a ”Cat café” and an ”Escape room”. Gameplay consists of placing and moving ”route tiles” (which display roads) onto their personal grid to build paths to each attraction and score them. These tiles sometimes also show bonus animals or statues you meet along your way. Routes are scored based on their length, and the special scoring conditions on each attraction, which may give bonus points for fulfilling certain conditions (e.g. +1 point per cat on route to the ”Cat Café”), powers to boost your future turns (e.g. extra movement on later turns from the ”City Bikes”) or even resources such as ”treat tokens” that can be spent to boost your score at future locations (e.g. +2 points per treat spent at the ”Dog park”).

The base gameplay loop is simple and satisfying. Each round players will draft a new route tile and then simultaneously play a tile from their hand to a grid location on their board chosen by the active player (e.g. D4). They may then move or rotate any one tile on their board. When two attractions are connected by a continuous road the player may then visit one of these attractions and score it.

The central challenge of the game is deciding which attractions to visit in which order to reach your goal of a day well spent first (e.g. reach 60 points). Will you aim to net an early lead by visiting high scoring attractions early such as the ”Theatre”, which gives extra points to early visitors, or invest in the future by visiting engine building attractions like the ”City bikes” (extra tile movement) or the ”Lake” (extra tile rotation). Will you build short routes to visit many attractions quickly, or long routes to take advantage of bonuses (e.g. +1 point per animal on route to the ”Zoo”). There are many possible winning strategies in this game, and as the locations of the attractions are randomised each game there is endless replayability.