Parks

15th January 2022

It's a Saturday and we're at the Bisley Scout Hall with the Woking Gaming Club for Wogglecon,  for a day of gaming and hanging with with friends.

There are a lot of national parks in the USA and you're about to hike a bunch of them in the first game of the day; Parks.   

---

What's in a game?

• Board: This small board is not a game board in the traditional sense and is instead used to manage the game's numerous decks of cards.
• Tiles: Parks uses some unusually shaped tiles to construct it's main playing area.
  Trailhead & trail end: These are the start and end tiles for each hike and have a sort of chevron shape to one edge each. The trail end card has 3 options for players; visit a park (Which is another way of saying buy the card.), buy gear or reserve a park card.
  Trail sites: These are the trails that hikers will travel along during the game and provide players with the resources they need. They are unusually chevron shaped tiles and come in 2 types; basic and advanced. Basic tiles are used right from the start of the game, while the advanced ones are introduced one at a time at the start of every season.
  Camera tile: This large token is obviously shaped like a camera and makes it 'cheaper' for the owning player to take photographs, it's likely that the camera token will change hands frequently.
  Campfire tiles: There is one of these in every player colour and they're double-sided. One side shows a crackling and roaring fire, while the flip side shows an extinguished and smoking campfire site.
• Tokens: Parks makes use of numerous tokens to track the game's resources.
  Resource tokens: The game uses 4 types of resources; water, sunshine, mountain and forest, the wooden tokens are suitability shaped and coloured to represent this.
  Wildlife tokens: These brown wooden tokens are 'wild' (SIC) resources and can be used as any of the 4 resources mentioned above. Interestingly, each wildlife token is a depicted as different animal, no two are the same.
  Photograph tokens: When players take photographs, they acquire one of these uniquely illustrated square card tokens. Photograph tokens score VPs at the game end.
• First hiker token: Unlike all all the other components, this first player triangular token is made of metal! It depicts a stylised image of the wind gusting past a snowy-topped mountain.
• Cards: Parks also makes use of several sets of cards.
  Park cards: These oversized cards each depict a different national park in the USA and can be bought by players. Along the bottom it shows the cost in resources and VP value. Additionally, each card also contains a small amount of text that provides titbit of information that park. It even names the artist who created the picture.
  Gear cards: Players will have opportunity to buy gear cards using sunshine tokens, these provide bonuses or benefits such as making something cheaper or being able to acquire more of a certain resource, etc. Gear cards feature heavily stylised illustrations.
  Canteen cards: After canteen cans are acquired by players, they are activated by placing a water token on them and confer some bonus, typically acquiring other resources.
  Season cards: Parks is played over 4 seasons and a card is revealed at the start of each one which will alter or add a rule for that season as well as determine the weather for the season - how sunny or wet it will be which in turn determines if bonus sunshine and/or water tokens appear along the.
  Year cards: If a game is played over 4 seasons, you've got to have a year card! These are basically secret objective cards. Quite often this involves visiting specific parks in some way or other.
• Meeples: There are 2 hiker meeples (Heeples?) in each player colour.

​
​The quality of Park's components is universally high and it's obvious that a lot of care and attention has been put into the game, this extends even to the packaging and token trays.
The cards are fine and the tiles are appropriately thick. The tokens are all wooden, well made and colourful, the individually shaped wildlife tokens are the standout here. Finally, the inclusion of a metal first player marker is pretty unusual but it has a satisfyingly weighty feel to it and is a cool addition.

For nearly all of it's artwork, the game sources The Fifty Nine Parks Print Series which as the name suggests, is a project which consists of a picture of each American national park created by a different artist. Perhaps it could be argued that doing this saves on the art budget but honestly, it feels like a great collaboration.
As a result the game features excellent and varied artwork throughout, all the park cards and photography tokens are uniquely illustrated, the art also features on all the card backs and even the inside of the box lid! Fantastic!

Parks makes use of a fairly wide variety of iconography but for the most part it was easy to comprehend and presented no obstacle to the game.

---

---

How's it play?
​Setup

• Board: Put out the board.
• Park cards: Shuffle the park cards into a face-down deck and place it on it's spot on the board. Deal 3 cards face-up on to their allotted spaces.
• Gear cards: As with the park cards, shuffle the gear cards into a face-down deal and deal 3 face-up.
• Canteen cards: Shuffle the canteen cards into a face down deck on its spot on the board and deal 1 face-up to each player.
• Year cards: Shuffle the year cards into a face-down deck and deal 2 to each player.
  Each player should keep 1 and discard the other out of the game. This card will become the players' secret objective for the game.
• Trail: Separate the basic and advanced trail site tiles, then take the player-dependant number basic trail sites and randomly add 1 advanced tile.
  Next, shuffle all these tiles and lay them out from left to right, add the trailhead to the 'start' on the left and trail end to the right. They should all 'slot' together and you have the trail for the first season.
• Season cards: Shuffle the season cards into a face-down deck, place it on it's spot on the board, then draw and reveal the card for the first season.
  This will determine the special rule for the season and will also dictate the weather conditions and where bonus sunshine and water tokens appear on the trail.
• Hikers: Give each player the 2 meeples and campfire tile in their colour. Players should place their meeples on the trailhead tile and put the campfire tile to the 'fire' side in their personal playing area.
• First player: Determine the first player.

On to play
Parks is played over 4 seasons during in which each the players' hikers travels along that season's trail from left to right.

• Hike: The active player must move one of their hikers, a hiker can be moved as far as the owning player wishes but only moves towards the right and can never go 'backwards'. Furthermore, when a hiker stops on a tile, the player must perform that tile's action, if they are unable to do so, then the hiker cannot stop on that tile. Additionally, if a hiker stops on a tile that already contains 1 or more hikers, then they must flip their campfire token over to the 'used' side. If the campfire has already been used, then again, the hiker cannot stop on that tile.
  Actions: On the basic tiles, the actions mostly involve collecting various resources from the supply, one tile allows the active player to take a photograph or acquire a canteen card.
  The 4 advanced tiles allow players to swap out their personal resources, an extra opportunity to use the 'buy' actions or to potentially copy another tile's action.
• Resource limit: Each player is limited to having 12 resources of any kind in their personal supply, including wildlife tokens.
• Canteens: Each player starts with a canteen and can acquire more. When a player collects a water token, instead of putting in their own supply, they can put it on an available canteen card to activate its ability. Frequently it allows the active player to collect a different resource. This might not seem like much, but water is one of the more abundant tokens in the game and using it to acquire rarer resources can prove beneficial.
• Photographs: If a player chooses to take a photograph, it costs them any 2 resources to do so and they put a photograph into their personal supply, after this they take the camera token into their ownership.
  If a player already has the camera token when they take a photograph, it only costs them 1 resource.
• Trail end: When a hiker reaches the trail end, the active player has a choice of 3 actions.
  Visit park: This actually means buy a park card with their resources. A park card can be bought by the active player from the 3 available from the board or park card they have previously reserved (See below for information on reserving.). If a card is taken from the board, it is immediately replaced from the deck
  Buy gear: The active must buy one of the 3 available gear cards. As with park cards on the board, if a gear card is bought, it is immediately replaced.
  Reserve park card: When selecting this action, the active player must reserve a park card. They can pick one of the 3 available cards or draw blindly from the deck, in either case, they're put into the player's area but they have not been bought yet and do not score VPs until they are.
  The first player to reserve a park also takes the first player marker for the next season.
  Flip campfire: This is not an action per se; if a hiker reaches the trail end and the player's campfire token has been flipped to the used side, it is flipped back to the fire side. Thus a campfire can be used twice in a season.
• Last hiker: When there is only 1 hiker left on the trail, on their turn, they must go directly to the trail end.
• Season's end: When all hikers from all players have reached the trail end, the season is over and several actions occur.
  Photograph: Whoever have the camera token and take an additional photograph for the discounted cost.
  Canteen: All water tokens on all canteen cards are removed and they become available to be used in the next season.
  Trailhead: Move all the hikers on to the trailhead in preparation for a next hike.
  New trail: Pick up all the tiles in the trail and randomly add another advanced tile to the stack and shuffle them. Then deal out the tiles to create a new, slightly longer trail for the next season.
  Season change: A new season card is drawn with a new special rule and a new weather pattern to apply to the trail tiles.
  First player: Play now begins for the new season, starting with the current first player.

​Endgame
Once the 4th season has been completed, the game ends.
Players score points from the parks they've visited (Bought.), they also score a point for each photo they took and whoever has the first player token at the game end scores 1 point for it.
Finally; players reveal their year cards, completing the objective on these usually scores 2-3 points.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

---

---

Overall
Parks is essentially a light worker placement game added where your 2 workers only ever head right combined with resource management.
It's a game all about planning trips that means that it's about acquiring resources to buy park cards which generally provide the majority of VPs required to win the game. However, it is impossible to fully plan things out. Going from season to season, players will have a good idea what resources and tiles will be available but not where they will appear. It requires adaption and some creative thinking when faced with a different tile layout.

Limiting the resources a player can own to 12 is an solid rule, it prevents players hording too much and splurging out big at once. It also makes players think about optimising their strategies.
The initial urge in Parks is to travel as slowly as possible to collect as many resources as possible and in the early-game that's not a bad idea but sooner or later, players will need to use them up and that means visiting parks.
Remember, players have only 2 hikers and that means they can only use the visit park action on the trail end twice per season (Provided they don't use any other actions on the tile.), this means that players have 8 opportunities to visit parks, yes; there's an advanced trail tile that allows extra buy actions but there's no guarantee where and when it'll appear.

This brings me to the worker placement element of Parks. Each player can use their campfire a maximum of 2 times in a season, it means thinking carefully before moving on to a occupied tile, it also means trying to anticipate how other players will move and if necessary, getting there first! Or perhaps moving the other hiker so that whoever is occupying the tile you need may have moved by the following turn.

Ultimately it means that players should look to optimise their moves, balance resource acquisition with card acquisition, players might well be competing for the same park card and watching a card you want being taken by another player because you tarried to collect an extra resource can be galling.
Players will have the double-obstacle of reacting to both seasonal changes and the choices made by the other players.

The game's rules are not over-complex but also provide a fair amount of depth. There's enough interaction between players to force you to pay attention to their choices . Decisions that players face are always meaningful and getting wrong could lose you out.
Add to this the game's top notch thematically appropriate production values and you have a small package that delivers a big game.

Having said that, it's not without a couple of drawbacks.
Most significantly; the game experience can change notably with player count. A 3-player game will feel quite different to 5-player. The hiker count goes from 6 to 10, the tiles become a lot more crowded and it becomes more challenging to do what you want. While in games with 4 or more players an extra basic tile is added into the mix, it doesn't quite alleviate the increased clutter on the trail.
Secondly, a 5-player game seems to last around 2 hours and that perhaps feels a little overlong. Parks doesn't outstay its welcome and it's not a game-breaker but it can feel a little long for what it is.

Other than that, Parks is well presented, accessible and satisfying to play (At least when you get the park card you want!).
It's definitely one that's worth trying.