By this point, you probably know that I’m a fan of word games. From Hardback to Paperbackto Paperback Adventures to Bananagrams and Illiterati, I enjoy word games quite a bit, and I enjoy discovering new ones. I know there are books and books of word games, and dozens of apps with daily word puzzles that I could be playing, but I’m always fascinated by how many different games there are to play using nothing more than letters and words. Half the fun for me is simply discovering another take on such a familiar idea.
Letter Tycoon has players making words with cards. Each player starts with seven letter cards in hand, and there are three common cards available in the middle of the table. On your turn, you can use as many of those common letters as you want to make a word. Depending on how long your word is, you’ll earn money which is points. The only thing you use your money for is to buy patents. Patents are really the heart of the game because some of them will give you persistent abilities for the rest of the game.
Most patents simply give you an extra cent whenever another player uses one of your letters. Naturally, that means you should probably grab the E, T, A, O, and I patents first. They’re more expensive, of course, but they also seem like they’ll pay for themselves over the course of the game. The less common letters like Q, W, and X are cheaper, but they usually come with unique powers as well. Some let you double the money you earn from a word, while another lets you create two words in a single turn. There are some neat ideas in the patent system, and I do like the feeling of gradually building a little engine around the letters you own.
The goal is ultimately to accumulate wealth. The game ends once someone reaches the wealth threshold, which is calculated using both the money they have on hand and the value of the patents they’ve purchased. Buying an expensive patent doesn’t actually reduce your wealth because its purchase price counts as part of your assets. It’s kind of like buying a house. Yes, you spend a lot of money, but you also gain an asset that’s theoretically worth the same amount. Well… maybe that’s not the best comparison these days.
Letter Tycoon is an interesting concept, but it falls short compared to many of the other word games I’ve played recently, especially Hardback. The biggest issue for me is randomness. You’re drawing back up to seven cards every round, and sometimes you just draw a terrible hand. There were turns where I had a single vowel available between all ten letters I could use, and there were other turns where it felt like I had nothing but O’s and U’s. Sometimes a bad draw simply means you don’t have a worthwhile turn, and that kind of sucks.
Another issue is that there are no wild cards. You’re completely beholden to the ten letters available to you. Maybe those letters don’t let you spell anything useful. Maybe they don’t let you create a word long enough to afford the patent you wanted. That’s probably uncommon, but the possibility exists, and it’s frustrating. Coming from games like Hardback and Paperback, it’s hard not to compare them. Paperback always has a common vowel available, while Hardback lets you turn any card into a wild. Those little design decisions give you just enough freedom to make the words you want to make, or at least turn a bad hand into something salvageable. I never quite felt that same flexibility here.
Another reason the game frustrates me is that you simply earn more money for making bigger words. There’s nothing really pushing you toward making interesting words or finding clever combinations of patents. You just make the biggest word you can because bigger words equal more money. Yes, to buy a patent you have to use a letter in your word, but you’ll rarely be blocked out of buying patents due to none existing for the letters you just used. Compare that to Hardback, where you might deliberately use certain letters because they synergize with one another or because they activate special abilities. Here, having a larger vocabulary is simply better. I’m not terribly against that in principle, but it also feels like the design could have done something more interesting with the letters.
I guess that’s where a lot of my frustration comes from. I’ve played a lot of great word games, so when I play one that hasn’t really solved these issues, I notice it immediately. That’s probably a little unfair. Not every word game needs to solve problems the same way, and not every game should copy Hardback. But after seeing other designs tackle these issues so elegantly, it’s difficult not to miss those ideas when they’re absent.
My next criticism is that individual games don’t really feel that different from one another. Every time you sit down to Letter Tycoon, the only thing that’s changing is the letters in your hand. There’s no real arc to the experience. Sure, you might pick up a couple of powers that let you double your earnings or make two words, but for the most part you’re simply using ten letters to make words over and over until someone accumulates enough wealth to end the game. I never got the feeling that I was discovering new strategies or that future plays would unfold much differently than the previous one.
I will say that I really enjoy the artwork. All of the patent cards are illustrated as blueprints for different inventions and technologies, and they look great on the table. It’s a small thing, but I appreciated the presentation every time I looked at a new patent.
I think Letter Tycoon is worth trying once. I don’t think there are many hidden strategies waiting to be uncovered, and I don’t think there are many reasons for me to come back after a play or two. If you don’t have a large vocabulary, you’ll simply do worse, and unfortunately there are plenty of other word games that offer more interesting decisions, more variety between plays, or better ways to reward clever use of shorter words instead of simply making the longest word possible.
At the end of the day, I played Letter Tycoon twice on Board Game Arena, and I think that’s where I’m going to leave this one. It has a few neat ideas, particularly with the patent system, but when I have so many stronger word games on my shelf, it’s hard to justify coming back.
Hansa Teutonica has got to be one of the most uninviting board games around. Granted, it came out in 2009, but in a market where every game has bright, vibrant, beautiful artwork on full display, here’s Mr. Beige Boy with his stupid little moustache staring morosely at the player as he signs his tax documents. And yet, Hansa Teutonica has endured because its gameplay is so interactive and interesting. This is the quintessential example of “don’t judge a book by its cover.”
In Hansa Teutonica, players are members of the Hanseatic League trying to spread their influence by establishing routes of traders and merchants. On your turn, you’ll place a number of your pieces onto spaces between towns on the board. If every space on a route is your colour, you can claim that route and establish your influence in one of the trade houses at either end.
If someone happens to be in your way (and trust me, they will be in your way a lot), you can bump players off their space on a route. Displacing people is a core part of the game. It costs you, though. When you place one of your cubes in a spot where an opposing cube already lays, you must discard an extra cube from your supply into the general stock. Then the displaced player gets to place the kicked out cube, plus an extra cube onto an adjacent path. This feels like a huge cost, giving your opponent an extra token on the board, but you know what they say. A cube on a prime route is worth two on other routes.
Once a route belongs entirely to you, you can spend an action to claim it. Whoever has the most recent trading post in the trade houses connected to that route earns points, and then you have a decision to make. You can establish a trading post by placing one of your markers into a trade office beside the route, potentially scoring points every time that route is completed in the future. Alternatively, if the route is connected to one of the guild houses, you can instead improve one of your abilities. These upgrades remove pieces from your player board, increasing the number of pieces available in your supply while also making your actions stronger. It’s one of those satisfying upgrades where you don’t really feel like you’re giving anything up. There’s also a third option available on one specific route that lets you place one of your discs onto the board for an immediate point bonus. Regardless of which option you choose, every cube on that completed route is removed from the board and returned to the general supply.
A big part of the game revolves around establishing yourself in those trade offices and guild houses scattered across the map. One of the biggest scoring opportunities comes from being the first player to connect the left side of the board to the right, rewarding players who expand efficiently across the entire network rather than simply fighting over one corner.
The other major source of points comes from controlling those trade offices. Whenever someone completes a route next to a trade office you control, you score a point. That can become incredibly lucrative. One of my favourite spots to grab is the trade office beside the route that allows players to upgrade their actions. That route gets completed over and over throughout the game because everyone wants those upgrades. Instead of placing their own marker into the office, they’ll usually take the upgrade instead, and every single time they do, they’re quietly feeding you points.
And that decision itself, the short-term gain of upgrading your actions versus the long-term investment of claiming that trade office, is absolutely delicious. There are decisions like that scattered all throughout Hansa Teutonica. How often should you bump opponents, knowing it costs you an extra worker while giving them an extra worker in return? How often should you intentionally get in someone’s way, hoping they’ll eventually bump you off so you can place two cubes with a single action? Sometimes that first placement is almost a sacrifice. You’re betting that another player will follow through with the route you expect them to take. Of course, if they suddenly pivot somewhere else, you’re left with one lonely worker languishing on a forgotten route, wondering what could have been.
As the game goes on, everyone becomes more powerful. Players earn more actions, their actions become stronger, and the pace of the game accelerates dramatically. One of the upgrades lets you move workers already on the board. Getting cubes onto the board in the first place can be expensive, but once they’re out there, they’re surprisingly mobile. Being able to move three workers before claiming a route lets you swoop into opportunities that didn’t even exist a turn earlier. You spend the early game building your infrastructure, and then the late game becomes this wonderful scramble where everyone is repositioning pieces and trying to capitalize on whatever opportunities appear.
And that’s really what Hansa Teutonica is all about: capitalizing on situations as they present themselves. You’re constantly watching what your opponents are doing, trying to predict where they’ll go next, and slipping just enough into their plans to gain a small edge. Maybe you occupy a key route they wanted. Maybe you establish yourself in a guild house because you’re almost certain they’ll use that adjacent route to upgrade an action. Maybe you leave a cube in just the right place, practically inviting someone to bump it because you’ll benefit slightly more from the displacement. The game ends as soon as someone reaches twenty points, and once everyone’s engines have developed, those points come surprisingly quickly. Hansa Teutonica doesn’t so much end as it comes to a screaming halt.
This game is an absolute delight to play, provided you enjoy bumping shoulders with your opponents. If your favourite Eurogames are the kind where everyone puts their head down, quietly optimizes their own little puzzle, and compares scores two hours later, this probably isn’t the game for you. Hansa Teutonica wants you paying attention to every single move everyone else makes. It wants you delighting in getting in each other’s way. It wants you relishing the opportunity to bump someone off a route or profit from their decision to improve an action instead of taking a trade office. It’s a far more interactive game than that beige board and drab cover would ever lead you to believe.
The first time I played Hansa Teutonica, the person who owned it pulled it off the shelf and casually said, “Oh, this one’s actually on my sell list. I haven’t played it yet, though, so we should probably give it one play before I get rid of it.” After we finished, he immediately took out his phone and removed the “for sale” listing. Honestly, I can’t think of a better endorsement than that. There really is a fantastic game hiding underneath that unbelievably drab presentation.
To be fair, the subsequently released Big Box Edition does improve things. The board is more colourful, the cover art is better… although only slightly better. It’s still hardly going to catch your eye from across the room, but it is easier to look at than the original. Perhaps more importantly, the rulebook is significantly improved. I had an awful time working through the original rules, trying to remember the differences between cubes and discs, what counted as supply, what was available, what wasn’t available… it was just a chore. The newer rulebook presents everything much more clearly, which makes learning the game considerably easier.
Overall, I don’t have much to complain about with Hansa Teutonica. I’ve played it quite a few times now, and I’ve enjoyed every single play. Sure, your group might eventually develop a bit of a meta around which opening routes are strongest, but I don’t think that’s much of a problem. Once the early game settles, strategies naturally branch off as opportunities appear, and reacting to those opportunities is what makes the game so much fun. I also think it plays better with more players than fewer. The extra interaction really brings the board to life. This is the kind of Eurogame that gets people talking, laughing, blocking each other, and generally messing with one another’s plans, and those are exactly the kinds of Eurogames I enjoy most.
Last week I talked about Gaia Project and how that game, with all of its decisions and cascading consequences, makes my brain hurt. Hansa Teutonica makes me smile. Yes, there are still plenty of meaningful decisions to make, but they’re so much less mentally taxing. There are fewer gears constantly turning in your head. Instead, the joy comes from putting down a cube, knowing you’re getting in someone’s way, looking them square in the eyes, and silently daring them to bump you off the route. Not many Eurogames encourage that kind of interaction, and I think that’s what makes Hansa Teutonica so special.
It can be difficult to review a game like Gaia Project. At this point, everyone who likes the game has already played it or already knows they like it. It feels like everyone who hasn’t played it yet has a reason. Either it’s too intimidating, or they bounced off the pedigree that Gaia Project was born from, namely Terra Mystica or Age of Innovation. It’s one of those games that has built such a reputation for itself that most people have already decided where they stand before the box even hits the table. And the people who love it, LOVE IT.
Gaia Project is a one-to-four-player resource management Euro game where players take on one of fourteen asymmetric factions and attempt to utilize their limited resources to expand their influence across the galaxy and earn the most victory points. There’s a lot to do in Gaia Project, and the game is played over six rounds. Every round, players take one action on their turn, with turns continuing around the table until each player eventually passes. Once you pass, you’re done for the round, but everyone else gets to keep going until they’ve exhausted what they can do.
One of my favourite mechanisms in the game is actually its player interaction through the power system. On your player board, each faction has these little power bowls with power tokens slowly cycling between them, Mancala style. Whenever someone builds or improves a building near one of yours, you get the opportunity to charge power. If all you have nearby is a humble little mine, you’ll get a single power charge for free. But as your buildings become more advanced, you’ll often have the option to charge two or even three power instead. The catch is that charging the extra power costs you one or two victory points.
At first that sounds completely backwards. Why would you willingly throw away points? The answer is that power lets you perform additional actions or convert it into resources that will often earn you more points than you sacrificed in the first place. It’s one of those wonderfully Euro-style decisions where you’re constantly evaluating whether a short-term loss creates a larger long-term gain.
The game starts with everyone choosing a faction. I’ve read online discussions where people argue this is where games are won and lost. Some groups will study the map before the game even starts and actually bid victory points just for the privilege of choosing factions first because they believe they can exploit that particular galaxy layout better than everyone else. Our group is nowhere near that level of meta. We simply deal two faction boards to each player and let everyone choose between those options, which honestly is more than enough decision-making for us.
Every faction has its own home planet type. One of the primary actions throughout the game is building mines, but before you can build anything, you first have to reach a planet. At the beginning of the game your ships can only reach adjacent spaces, but one of the technology tracks gradually extends that range to two, three, or even four spaces away, letting you leap across the galaxy, but I’ll touch on technology tracks in a little bit.
Of course, simply reaching a planet isn’t enough. Unless it’s your faction’s native planet type, you’ll also have to terraform it. There are seven planet types in the game, and every faction naturally lives on only one of them. Every other planet requires varying amounts of terraforming before it becomes habitable. That’s another important consideration when choosing your faction. If your faction is only one terraforming step away from the same planet types as two other factions, all three of you are going to spend the game fighting over those worlds.
So to build a mine you need to reach a planet, terraform it if necessary, and then simply pay one ore and two credits to place your mine. Once a building goes onto the board, it never leaves your control. That permanence is important because players can absolutely box one another into corners, limiting future expansion and cutting off access to sections of the galaxy. Since every building you place also uncovers additional income on your player board, every placement feels significant. Early on, each mine you put down increases your ore income, slowly growing your engine one building at a time.
Another major action is upgrading your buildings. Buildings follow a strict technology tree. Mines upgrade into trading stations, trading stations can become either planetary institutes or academies, and academies can eventually receive one final upgrade. Whenever you upgrade, the old building returns to your player board and the new building replaces it on the map. Earlier I mentioned that buildings never leave the board, and that’s still true. You’re simply replacing your own structure with a better one, retaining control of the planet you initially placed it on.
The interesting part is what happens on your player board. Returning a mine means covering up the income that mine was providing. Sure, your new trading station will earn you credits each income phase, but you’ve also just reduced your ore production by reclaiming that mine. You’re constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul.
It’s also worth mentioning that upgrading a mine into a trading station costs either three credits or six credits. The cheaper cost only applies if the upgraded building will charge another player’s power, rewarding players for building near one another (and punishing those who choose to build in their own little corner of the map). Otherwise, you’re paying the full six credits. Trading stations produce more income over time, but they’re still expensive enough that timing really matters. Upgrade too early and you suddenly find yourself with fewer mines on the board and not enough ore to continue expanding. Upgrade too aggressively toward the higher-tier buildings and you may have these incredible abilities while simultaneously wondering why you’re broke all the time.
Another action is forming federations. Whenever you can connect buildings with a combined power value of seven or more, you may create a federation. If there are empty spaces between your buildings, you can bridge those gaps with satellites. Completing a federation earns you a federation token, which is usually worth a healthy chunk of points along with some useful resource bonus. More importantly, federation tokens become incredibly important later in the game.
Then there are the technology tracks. By spending four knowledge, you can advance one step on any of the game’s six technology tracks. These tracks affect all sorts of things: reducing terraforming costs, increasing your shipping range, providing Q.I.C. cubes that let you travel or terraform special planets, or unlocking Gaiaformers that let you colonize the strange purple Gaia planets that eventually become habitable. Every track pushes your engine in a different direction.
Getting to the top of a track isn’t easy. You need a federation token before you can move from the fifth to the sixth space, and when you do, you actually flip that federation token over as payment. On top of that, only one player may occupy the top, most powerful space of each technology track, so getting there first can be a huge advantage.
You can also advance these tracks by acquiring technology tiles. Building an academy lets you claim one, and these tiles vary wildly. Some provide additional income every round, some grant one-time resource boosts, and others offer entirely new bonus actions you can perform each round. Whenever you claim a standard technology tile from a row, you also advance one step on that corresponding technology track.
Near the top of the technology board are advanced technology tiles. If you’re already sitting on the fifth or sixth step of a technology track, you may claim one of these instead. They’re much stronger, but they come with two costs. First, you need to flip another federation token. Second, you have to cover one of your existing technology tiles. Sometimes that’s easy if you’re covering a one-time resource bonus you’ve already used. Other times you’re giving up an income bonus you’ve relied on all game. Every decision seems to create another decision.
There are plenty of other actions available as well, but I think by this point you probably get the idea. Gaia Project is a huge, complex board game built on interlocking systems. It’s a game about efficiency and squeezing just enough resources together to perform one more action before the round ends. A critical mistake early in the game might mean that next round you only get two or three actions before having to pass because you’ve completely starved yourself of resources. It is absolutely brutal by design.
The flipside is that when you finally unlock the puzzle, it must feel incredible. You spend six resources here, gain four resources back there, use those four resources to perform two additional actions, move up multiple technology tracks, expand across the galaxy, and somehow everything falls into place. I think that feeling is exactly why Gaia Project is so beloved. It’s the kind of game that rewards careful planning and deliberate sequencing. There isn’t random luck waiting to ruin your strategy. The only thing standing between you and victory is how well you’ve thought through your decisions.
That being said, this is absolutely not multiplayer solitaire. You cannot simply stare at your own player board and expect to do well. So many things in Gaia Project are finite, especially the real estate. Players are constantly trying to snake planets away from each other one turn earlier than expected. The shared power actions and Q.I.C. actions can only be claimed once per round, so being first and grabbing the action everyone else desperately wanted can completely swing an entire round. It’s an incredibly crunchy, cerebral experience.
So why don’t I like it?
I think my biggest problem is that I’m just not very good at Gaia Project. I am the player who reaches round two or three and suddenly realizes I only get two or three actions because I mismanaged my resources somewhere half an hour earlier. Then I spend half the game trying to recover enough income just to function again. Nearly every time I’ve played Gaia Project, I’ve come in dead last. I’m scoring around one hundred points while everyone else is sitting comfortably between one hundred and sixty and one hundred and ninety. It doesn’t feel particularly good. I constantly feel hamstrung because I’m missing one credit, or I don’t quite have enough knowledge to reach the next technology level that would unlock the thing I actually wanted to do.
So my main problem with Gaia Project is really just a skill issue.
The game also takes about four hours, so it’s not exactly something I’m eager to pull off the shelf on a Wednesday night when everyone has work the next morning. I’ve made similar criticisms of Terra Mystica and Age of Innovation. They’re all descendants of the same system. They share a lot of DNA, even though people who have played them extensively will rightfully tell you they’re all very different games and that those differences matter tremendously. I don’t doubt them. They’re just all built around a style of resource optimization that I consistently struggle with.
The question I’ve been asking myself after my most recent play is this: how many times am I willing to play a game I don’t particularly enjoy because someone else at the table absolutely loves it? I think the important context to answer that question is frequency. We probably play Gaia Project once a year, at best. Once a year I’m perfectly happy to sit down, play a game I know I’m not good at, and get absolutely curb-stomped because my friends genuinely enjoy pulling the levers and dancing with the system. I can absolutely see where people derive joy from Gaia Project. I really can. I’m just not one of those people. Maybe we’d play faster if we played it more often. Maybe I’d remember to build a resource engine first before rushing the top tier buildings if we played it twice in a row. But we’ll never know.
For me, Gaia Project ends up being a frustrating experience because I constantly feel handcuffed by my lack of resources. I’m constantly one credit short of a Happy Meal. There are literally hundreds of games I’d rather play. At the same time, I can’t ignore the incredible design achievement sitting in front of me. Balancing fourteen asymmetric factions while creating this kind of strategic depth and ridiculously high skill ceiling is remarkable.
It’s honestly amazing looking at the highest-rated players on Board Game Arena and seeing people with over sixteen hundred games played maintaining something like a ninety-one percent win rate. Then I watch expert playthroughs where players casually break two hundred points and it feels almost unreal. Watching them play is kind of like watching Bruce Lee smash concrete with his bare hands. Then I stand up, turn around, and immediately stub my toe on a brick wall.
I am not Bruce Lee. I will never be Bruce Lee.
But for all the Bruce Lees of the board gaming community, I’m genuinely glad Gaia Project exists.
I bought Pies for a lot of reasons. First, I like trick-taking games. Second, I’ve really been appreciating small-box games that I can bring to people’s houses or out on our adventures without having to haul a whole separate bag. Third, the designer, Matthias Kramer, is also the designer of one of my favorite games, Glen More II, so I was quite intrigued to see what he could do with a small-box card game.
And probably the biggest reason I bought Pies is because Allplay sold it for $3.14 on March 14th. I do love me a good deal.
Now, I said above that I love trick-taking games, but I’d argue that Pies is not really a trick-taking game. It’s more of a tricky card game.
In Pies, there are three rounds, and each round has its own deck of cards. Each round, you’ll deal out all the cards to all the players and then, turn by turn, place a single card face up on the table. After everyone has placed one card, you’ll determine who played the highest number. They get the first-player token. The person who played the second-highest value gets the second-player token, and so on, all the way down to the player who played the lowest value card, who gets the last-player token.
Once player order has been decided, the person who played the highest-value card gets to take any one of the face-up cards and place it in front of them, creating a tableau. Then the next player does the same, and so on down the line. The last player takes the final card on the table plus one plum card as compensation for their poor showing.
Many of these cards will have a special action on the top, and when you take a card with a special action, you must perform it immediately. That can be anything from stealing a card from another player to gaining pie tokens, which you can use on future turns to increase the value of your card. Or it might be taking the dog token and placing it in front of you, protecting you from those dirty fruit thieves.
The other thing that can appear at the top of these fruit cards is a recipe, which is how you score points and ultimately win a game of Pies.
At any time when you take a card from the table, you can then fulfill a recipe, or make a fruit mix. To do so, you’ll take one of the cards in your tableau that has a recipe on top and discard cards from your tableau that match the requirements shown on that recipe.
These recipes might ask for two or three of one type of fruit, two matching pairs of fruits, or even five completely different fruits. The recipe card itself can be part of the fruit mix, but it doesn’t have to be. If you use a recipe card with fruit on it but don’t include that fruit as part of the mix, you still have to discard all the cards that make up the fruit mix plus the recipe card itself. So it’s slightly more efficient if the recipe card is actually contributing fruit to the recipe you’re completing.
And that’s largely the whole game. You’ll play cards, take cards, trigger special actions, and make fruit mixes. At the end of three rounds, you’ll reveal your fulfilled recipe cards, count up your points, and whoever has the most points is the winner.
I think the first point to make here is that the fruit artwork is really beautiful. It’s very reminiscent of the kind of art that adorns Wingspan cards, or the tree artwork in Arboretum, or the artwork that adorned my grandmother’s porcelain bowls. It’s just quality, real-life fruit artwork.
The gameplay is nicely interactive, but in the mean way where you’re actively undoing what other players did on their turns. Because you play a single card each round, having a card stolen from you feels pretty punishing. It’s not the kind of interaction that I particularity enjoy. I do enjoy the tension of the card play, though. Trying to reserve certain cards so you can play them at the moment you can use their abilities for full effect. Or, waiting until you’re last in player order so you can play the card you really want to take into your tableau when you can be certain you’ll pick first.
I don’t think Pies shines at 3 players, however. There were not many Dog cards, so one player just had immunity from being stolen from for the majority of the game. Unsurprisingly, that player won that game. But the player who steals the most is certainly not guaranteed a victory. The player who manages to actually fulfill their pie recipes is the winner, as ending the game with a tableau full of fruit will give you nothing but fruit flies at the end of the day.
There was a fair amount of luck in Pies, whether you’re gifted the cards that you want, or if you have the opportunity to snag any recipes when it’s time to pick cards. Of course what often feels like luck is other players conspiring against you to get the good cards for themselves. I think as players get more and more familiar with the cards, you’ll be able to make some clever plays, but most of the score will come from snapping up the right card at the right time.
At the end of the day, we enjoyed Pies, but not as much as some other trick taking games, such as The Crew or NYET!. Especially at 3 players where 3 Witches absolutely shines. The card play is a little too thoughtful to be a pub game, but if you’re really into trick taking games and want something to end a board game night with, Pies is the perfect gaming dessert.
I’ve talked about a bunch of polyomino tile-laying games on this blog, from Project L to the more recent Frosted Blooms, and in those posts I’ve often said that I really enjoy poluomino tile laying games. I still suspect a lot of this joy comes from my background in Tetris. My mom was very good at Tetris, and she would mercilessly crush me when we played multiplayer, until I got my first job and with my first-ever paycheck as a teenager, I bought myself a GameCube and a copy of Tetris and practiced and practiced in my room until I could finally bury her in junk lines.
Take that, Mom.
But that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is to talk about Bärenpark.
In Bärenpark, players are trying to build the best bear park. Every player starts with one 4×4 entrance tile and one of the green enclosure tiles, the size of which depends on your player order. These green enclosure tiles are small attractions, like a food stand or a porta-potty. They can be one, two, or three squares large and come either in a straight line or in a small L shape. On the central board in front of all players, there’s also a bunch of small bear enclosure tiles arranged in stacks. Each of these enclosures are 4 squares large and each of the 4 types are in the classic Tetris tetromino-style shapes, and the highest point value tile is on the top of each stack. Lastly, covering nearly half of the entire supply board are the coveted large enclosure tiles, which are five or six squares large and worth a healthy chunk of points.
Your 4×4 entrance tile is littered with icons. There are green wheelbarrows, white cement trucks, and construction crews. Covering those icons earns you pieces of the corrosponding type. Cover a wheelbarrow and you gain a small attraction tile. Cover a cement truck and you gain a medium bear enclosure tile. Cover a construction crew and you get to take another 4×4 park tile to expand your zoo.
Each turn, players simply place one tile from their supply onto their park, making sure it’s adjacent to an existing tile. Then, if they covered any icons in their zoo, the collect the corrosponding rewards and the next player takes their turn. The game ends when someone manages to completely fill all four of their 4×4 park sections, including the one they started with.
In addition to the points you earn directly from the various bear enclosures you’re placing into your park, there are a couple of other scoring opportunities. First, whenever you completely fill one of your 4×4 park sections, you get to erect a bear statue. The first player to do this scores the most points, and the statues steadily decrease in value as the stack gets depleted. There are also three randomly selected objectives available every game. Sometimes these are straightforward, like being the first player to collect three Panda bear enclosures, or just have three orange tiles touching each other. Other times they’re much trickier, requiring specific spatial arrangements, such as placing three L-shaped green tiles end-to-end. These objectives make the spatial planning aspect of Bärenpark significantly more challenging than it first appears.
Because you’re earning points from so many different places, from the bear statues, from the various enclosures, and from the objectives, and the fact that each of those point sources are slowly diminishing, you’re constantly being pulled in different directions. Do you place the piece that will finish a 4×4 section and secure a valuable statue? Or is it more important to stretch off into a new area and cover two icons with a single placement? Maybe you don’t have a need for that 2×2 yellow tile, it doesn’t fit perfectly anywhere in your park right now, but it’s the highest point value piece available, and you can see that your opponent does have a perfect spot for it. Is it worth taking now? Also, if you place a tile and don’t cover an icon, do you have an extra piece in your reserve to play next turn? If you don’t, you need to burn an entire turn taking a single green tile, which is a huge disadvantage.
It’s managing all those little decisions that makes Bärenpark really fun to play for me.
I find Bärenpark infinitely replayable. Every time I sit down with this puzzle, I’m delighted. Even if the core game always feels fundamentally the same, there’s just something about this system that just keeps me coming back and brings a smile to my face every time I play. When the odd shapes just fall in your favor and you manage to always be one step ahead of your opponents, netting an extra point here and a small bonus there, it’s great. And then when you eventually stumble across the finish line and count everything up to find that you won by a mere 5 points, it feels incredibly gratifying.
Of course, the inverse is also true. Sometimes you get to the end of the game and discover your park is dotted with tiny single-square holes. Holes that you now need to spend round after round filling those holes with porta-potties, because apparently you thought it was more important to lay your 3 large enclosures in a weird shape just so they touched, all so you could earn that one objective, and your two opponents managed to achieve it before you did! That part of the game is much less fun.
But hey. Skill issue, right? I don’t know how, but I rarely come in 2nd in Bärenpark. I’m either absolutely crushing my opponents, or being crushed. There is no middle ground.
What I appreciate most about Bärenpark is how focused it is. If you like polyomino tile-laying games, Bärenpark is about as good as it gets. There’s nothing here to distract from the spatial puzzle. There aren’t any markets to manipulate, side mechanisms to explore, or layers of complexity piled on top of the core experience. This game is simply about taking tiles, placing tiles, and trying to make them all fit together as efficiently as possible.
If spatial puzzles are your jam and you haven’t played Bärenpark yet, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot.
The two-player-only category of games is a crowded genre. It’s crowded with a lot of extremely good games, and I’m not even talking about games that play more players but also happen to play really well at two, like Race for the Galaxy or Innovation. I’m talking about games that are specifically designed for two players and two players only. 7 Wonders Duel, Targi, Star Realms, Splendor Duel, Patchwork, you know the ones. Among all those two-player games, one of the first 2 player games I ever played, and to this day remains one of the best 2 player game in my mind, is Jaipur, designed by Sébastien Pauchon in 2009.
In Jaipur, both players are trying to become the best merchant around. Each player is dealt five cards to start, and those cards can be one of six different types of goods. There are the basic goods: leather, spices, and cloth, and the luxury goods: silver, gold, and rubies. The cards can also be camels. Camels never live in your hand, but they sit in front of you on the table. This is important because the hand limit is a huge thing to contend with in Jaipur.
Between the two players is a market of five cards. On your turn, you’ll do one action, and there are a couple of different actions available to you. Probably the easiest one is selling goods. Beside the card market is an arrangement of cardboard pogs, discs arranged in ascending value, with the highest-value token sitting on the top of each stack. Each type of good has its own value structure, and they decrease in value at different rates. The first leather sold is worth five points, but the last five are only worth a point each. Meanwhile, all five silver tokens are worth five points each. The coveted rubies are even better, with the first two sold worth seven points each and the remaining three worth five.
Whenever you sell a set of goods, you take that many tokens from the supply and add them to your area. Those become your points at the end of the round. You can also attract a bonus token if you sell three, four, or five of a good at once. Selling three goods gets you a bonus worth anywhere from one to three points. Selling four gets you four to six points, and selling five gets you a juicy eight to ten points. Because of that, it’s often worth holding out for those extra cards before cashing in.
Another action you can take is trading goods. You can take any number of cards from the market row, but you must place an equal number of cards back into it. This is helpful if, for example, you have two silver, a leather, and a cloth in hand and there are two more silvers sitting in the market. You can grab those silvers and replace them with the leather and cloth. This is where the camels come in. You can always use camels when trading, placing them into the market in exchange for other goods. But here’s where that hand limit matters. You can only hold seven cards in your hand at any time. If you’re already at that limit, you can’t take any more.
The last action is taking camels. If there are camels in the market row, you can simply take all of them and add them to your herd. The market then refills from the deck, potentially offering lucrative goods to your opponent.
Players take turns going back and forth, trading, selling, and accruing camels until three stacks of goods tokens have been depleted. At the end of the round, whoever has the most camels earns a five-point bonus, and then whoever has the most points wins the round. The winner of the game is the first player to win two rounds.
Jaipur is the kind of game that you teach someone who is kind of into games, in order to get them really into games. It’s a card game that feels unique and interesting, and when you walk away from it you can’t help but think about how you could have played better. It’s the kind of genius design that just sticks in your brain.
The push and pull of wanting to hoard goods until you have five of a kind for that really juicy bonus token is constantly juxtaposed against the diminishing returns of waiting too long. It’s not uncommon for one player to notice the other is hoarding all the spices, only to sell two spices from their own hand instead. They don’t get a set bonus, but they do snag the two highest-value spice tokens and leave only the low-value scraps behind. Suddenly that big stockpile your opponent has been carefully building doesn’t look nearly as impressive.
There aren’t enough good things to say about Jaipur. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s fun, it’s replayable, it’s competitive. It’s everything I want from a two-player game. If you have someone in your life who likes playing games with you, this is the perfect game to keep in your bag at all times.
Now, it is a little bit more than just a deck of cards, which makes it slightly awkward if you want to sit down at a coffee shop or in an airport and instantly start playing. But man, is it worth it.
There have been so many times where I’ve been absolutely convinced that I’ve won. I’ll be sitting there thinking, “Oh yeah, I’ve got this. Look at all these goods I’ve collected.” Then final scoring happens and I realize I’m somehow almost twenty points behind. Part of that comes from the fact that the value of the scoring tokens are hidden from the other player. You know the value of the goods tokens that have been taken, but once they’re face down you can’t easily recount everything and determine exactly where your opponent stands. Then you add in the set bonus tokens, which are drawn face down, and now you have no idea whether they just scored one point or three points for that sale of three goods last turn.
That little bit of mystery keeps both players on edge. It keeps both players making difficult decisions. Do you take the lucrative points now, or do you chase the bigger payday later? Because that later may never come…
Jaipur is one of those games I could talk about all day. If I were to create a Meeple and the Moose Hall of Fame list, a collection of games that I think are brilliant, nearly perfect, and that everyone should play, Jaipur would be high on that list. In case you’re wondering, a Hall of Fame is different from a Top 100 list. I love Jaipur. It is in my Top 100, though perhaps not as high as you might expect given all the praise I’ve lavished on it here. That mostly comes down to personal proclivities and preferences. I can recognize that Jaipur is a triumph regardless if there are other games I’d usually rather play.
Jaipur has been around for as long as I’ve been involved in board gaming. It was a game that my wife and I played a ton when we first started in the hobby, and even today, when someone tells me, “Oh yeah, I like Catan,” or “I’ve played Ticket to Ride,” Jaipur is one of the first games I reach for. It’s a game that shows people what else games can be.
