Designed by: Nagy Balázs
Christmas Tree sees you celebrate the – presumably topical – holidays without a Macaulay Culkin or Bruce Willis in sight. There’s no rolling dice to get through the day avoiding a family argument, or card-play to navigate your way to the best present. Instead everyone is decorating their own tree, and the best-adorned tree will be the winner.
How it works is like this. Each player begins with a plain ol’ fir and a bunch of diamond-shaped decoration tiles that they’ll play on it: the tiles are made up of various baubles, wrapped candies and gingerbread men – and note too that the edges of tiles, when aligned adjacently, also form lights. On a given turn, everyone adds a tile to their tree from a hand of tiles, and then passes the rest of the tiles to their left. The process repeats until all tiles have been placed, and then trees are scored before a new round begins.
What you score for is down to the players. Everyone is dealt a hand of scoring tiles at the start, and in each round you choose the one you feel best suits your tree and add it to the decoration tiles. They might reward a pattern of colours or shape of baubles, they might reward sets of lights, or candies. The tricky thing is not the adding of tiles to your tree – which must be placed adjacently to existing ones – but balancing the various scoring mechanisms in a given round, as well as (hopefully) preventing your opponents from getting tiles that will help them score a raft of points.
After a set number of rounds the game ends with some final scoring – gingerbread men will harvest you points based on what they are next to – and the player with the most points wins.
Pretty minimal. Although you can deprive someone of a tile they want, the main focus is on your own tree.
Everyone plays at the same time, but there may be pauses at times if some players face a trickier decision than others.
Apart from the minor issue of comprehending the scoring tiles - they're not always immediately understood - the brain-burning with Christmas Tree isn't the rules; it's managing the overlapping and possibly-incompatible demands of the scoring.
It's Christmas, so it depends a lot on the when and where and the past lives and emotional baggage of the players. But the scorecards provide a lot of variation, and it's not a solvable puzzle.
2-4
Players
10+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
Well, a board game about Christmas is always going to a hack-job, isn't it? An emotionally-hollow cash-in, designed to part desperate people from their hard-earned and line the pockets of faceless CEOs with offices in Bermuda? ....Except that Christmas Tree is more than a pleasant surprise - it's actually rather a good design, where repeat plays will bear muster and decisions are often agonising. It is very puzzley though, and the sort of game I'm terrible at: where varied objectives overlap and there's a kind of juggling of decisions and priorities that melt my brain. Considering the theme it's actually quite a curio really; not a shiny-toothed laughter-fest, but a head-scratching challenge that may appeal more to adults.