Review

From the Everglades to Yellowstone

Parks

Discover the US National Parks

Along four hiking trails during four seasons, you collect memories and resources. A trail is laid out, the gameboard shows park cards, equipment cards, bottle cards and season cards and you select one year card out of two as your Personal Bonus for the year, the show goals to fulfill. In your turn you move one of your two hikers on a new trail segment towards the exit and resolve the action - take marker (maximum 12), exchange markers, take photo, acquire water bottles, acquire wild animals, etc. At the end of the path you can reserve a park you want to visit, buy equipment, or visit a park, one of the displayed one or a reserved one. When all four seasons are done, you win with most points from parks you visited, photos and implemented personal goals from your Year card.

These core mechanisms become attractive and alive due to the beautiful, marvelous illustration on the one hand; a collection of illustrations called Fifty-Nine Parks was used in the game, the rules mention all the parks that are featured and the corresponding illustrators - I was fascinated how closely those paintings capture the flair and soul of the individual parks. On the other hand, the game features impressive and painstakingly implement details in the mechanisms.

For instance, you begin with a burning campfire and must damp it out if you want to enter an occupied trail segment; it can be re-kindled at the start of a new season. And you can, of course, only enter a segment if you can comply with the action. There are weather markers on the section, you take canteens at the viewpoints and can fill them with water markers you collect; you can discard markers to take photos, swap markers for wild animal jokers, and so on. Equipment also gives you bonuses at trail segments and simplifies visits to parks - the effects of equipment are permanent and cumulating, they lower the costs for a park visit. The personal goals are also challenging, you might need certain photos or symbols in given distribution or a visit to six parks with wood.

Parks is a far cry from a simple movement game with events; you must work very purposefully to get your necessary stock of markers to be able to make the visits to parks you want to make - the game is an attractive mix of worker placement, set collecting and, most of all, the very planned and exact use of resources to visit the parks. A beautiful game that plays beautifully, also in the solo version featuring park rangers as a counterpart.

Dagmar de Cassan

Players: 1-5

Age: 10+

Time: 40+

Designer: Henry Audubon

Artist: Fifty-Nine Parks

Price: ca. 50 Euro

Publisher: Feuerland Spiele 2020

Web: www.feuerland-spiele.de

Genre: Worker placement, resources

Users: With friends

Special: 1 player

Version: de

Rules: de en fr

In-game text: yes

Comments:

Very attractive illustrations

Haptically very nice

Good mix of mechanisms

Needs clever resources management

(c) Image Chris H. (BGG)

Compares to:

Unique due to topic and illustrations

Other editions:

Keymaster Games (en), Matagot (fr)

My rating: 7

Dagmar de Cassan:

A beautiful game with beautiful components and very attractive and challenging mechanisms.

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 3

Strategy (blue): 2

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 2

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0