Reef
Designed by: Emerson Matsuuchi
Reef is a puzzle game for 2-4 players where each turn boils down to two options – and sometimes less.
Each player is given a board and one of each colour in the four coral pieces, and everyone places the coral in the four central spots of their board. Players are each dealt two cards – kept secret from the other players – and the game begins.
On your turn, you can either take a card (-maximum hand size is four cards) from the face-up array or play a card. If you take a card, ignore the bottom half of it for now and simply add the coral pieces in the top half to your board: they can go wherever you like, even on top of other pieces (up to a maximum of four high). If you play a card, you now – at least in theory – score it as well. Each card’s lower half shows a coral arrangement of some kind on it: it might be a row of blues, or pink coral at least 2 levels high, or all yellow coral. If your board meets the requirements, you score the points on the card. If you meet the requirement multiple times, you also score it multiple times!
The game continues until at least one colour coral has run out from the supply, and then the current round is played to its conclusion. Players then get to score any remaining cards in their hands just once (-no multiples) and the player with the most points is the winner.
Sam says
Reef does what it sets out to do: pitched to be accessible, easy to teach, fast to play and a breezy pace to it. All good things. But I found the game to be otherwise fairly vanilla: there’s next to no interaction, and the decisions often feel fairly straightforward. After a couple of plays the novelty of the puzzle fades a little and there is nothing to pull me back to it. I wouldn’t run away in horror if someone suggested it, but it feels polished to the point where all the sharp edges have been chamfered into something easily palatable rather than any more exciting quality.
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Take That!
There's very little interaction at all, and what does occur is indirect.
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Fidget Factor!
Depends hugely on the spatial brain capacity of the players, but generally seems to move along quickly.
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Brain Burn!
It's about squaring the circle between what coral pieces you can get now versus how you can score them later. The cards are deliberately engineered to not make it easy!
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Again Again!
It doesn't feel hugely variable as an experience, but you certainly can't predict what cards will come and it's the cards that define your decision space.
