Parks

One of the early additions to the library was Parks, billed as simple game of your workers going on a hike along a trail and visiting different national park with gorgeous art. Simple to teach and with deluxe pieces and trays right out of the retail box. I tried it out on TTS before getting my own copy.

What’s interesting is that it tries to evoke being a “cozy” game, with its nature theme, but the reality is that it can be really cut-throat at times with how hikers will block each other. Each trail space can only hold one hiker, so if you wanted a particular space or action, you could find it being blocked for a while if a person chooses not to move it. The way to get around it is using your campfire you can break the placement rule and have the hiker you move to an occupied space. One interesting twist is that your campfire refreshes when one of your hikers reaches the end of the trail, so you want to make sure you use it appropriately since its usage is limited.

There’s also gear cards that usually act as permanent passives. And my favorite part is the canteens, where you spend water for a once per round extra bonus. So it gives a little bit of an engine builder feel to it when you get a lot of uses out of the canteens. After 4 rounds, you tally up your points and whoever has the most wins.

I will say that I think the Nightfall expansion adds some nice gameplay additions, especially with the parks that give you a bonus for visiting them. I definitely felt the loss of not having that expansion when I recently played a solo game. I have the Wildlife expansion but haven’t tried it yet, but given that it’s smaller than Nightfall I do see it as an ”always include” since it feels like an extra stuff. The one downside to the Parks box is that they don’t offer an “all-in-one“ storage solution, so I just have to keep those expansion boxes separate. There’s an upcoming Second Edition being released that seems to be everything all-together with different art and some minor tweaks to the gameplay, but I’m not exactly sold on getting the new edition yet.