Traveling Animals is a multi-difficulty trivia game in which players answer questions about animals or world environmental conservation. At the beginning of the game, each player independently selects whether they will play at the easy (tourist), medium (pathfinder), or hard (native) difficulty level. The goal is to correctly answer questions and be the first player to reach the "Global Animal Congress" (located off the east coast of Australia) with five collected trivia cards.
Traveling by dice-roll, players move their tokens along paths defined by real-world animal migration routes; side routs and branching paths allow for strategic movement. Upon landing on a question space, players get to answer a question from either an Animal or World card.
The 75 Animal cards each have a custom piece of artwork on the front depicting the animal in question and one trivia question for each of the three difficulty levels (usually in the form of true/false, multiple choice, and direct answer, respectively). A correct answer awards the card to the player; some spaces on the board can later cause cards to be lost or stolen. The 15 World cards work similarly, although they all share identical artwork.
Special spaces on the travel paths allow players to jump around the board, steal cards, lose cards, and gain/lose a turn. The rule book contains variant instructions.