Designed by: Henry Audubon
PARKS is a light and accessible family game of moving your hikers along trails and gathering up what you find. Visual collaborations with 59 illustrators and artists have created a stunning-looking game, and it’s easy to play too.
The game takes place over four rounds – or seasons – and in each season, on your turn, you simply move one of your two hikers as far as you like along the path which is made up of chevron-shaped tiles. Wherever you stop, you gather tokens on the matching part of the path: there is a default reward printed on the path itself, plus additional tokens added at the start of each season. The further you go, the less opportunity there is to stop again during the season though, so there’s a risk/reward balance to rushing ahead. You can also only share a spot with another hiker once during a season – this is tracked by a fireplace token – so that’s something else to factor in.
The tokens all represent aspects of things you’d encounter hiking through the parks – mountains, water, sun, trees. Generally you simply hang onto them until you have enough to buy one of the park cards, which are broadly speaking the goal of the game: they’re worth points. But everyone also has a water canister, which if you ‘fill’ with water you’ve collected will give you something else in return: a mountain, for instance.
However, some spots on the path give different options: one allows you to take another canteen card or a photo (photos cost resources and are worth 1 point), another gives you a ‘wild’ resource, another lets you convert resources into other resources and so on. When your hikers reach the end of the trail then you have choices: you can reserve a park card so nobody else can buy it, buy gear cards that give you in-game advantages (each has a simple explanation on it), or buy a park card as previously mentioned, spending your harvested resources. When there’s a single hiker left on the path, they sadly don’t get to take any more actions but are instantly catapulted to the end!
At the start of every season an extra section is added to the path, and after four seasons players total up their points from parks, photos, and potentially a Year card: everyone has one at the start of the game that gives you objectives to complete, and rewards with points if you’ve successfully done so.
A little. Spots get blocked on the path but it's usually incidental rather than targeted, and can be overcome with diligent use of a fire anyway. But you can find a Park card you had your eye on gets snaffled up by somebody else...
Low - once you're familIar with PARKS there's nothing here that will get you scratching your head
It's really about how best to make use of the margins here. Basically it's a simple matter of gathering what you need to buy a park card, but a bit of shrewd thinking and use of canisters and/or gear can give you the edge
There's enough variety here in how all the cards fall to ensure some variety from play to play
1-5
Players
8+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
PARKS is possibly the prettiest game I've seen. I cannot honestly rhapsodize quite as much about the gameplay - it's a fairly straightforward gather-stuff-to-get-stuff undertaking, the gathering being the resources and the getting being the trading-in of resources for a Park card: points. There are a couple of extra wrinkles, but that - over four rounds/seasons - pretty much is the game, sprinkled with a little spiciness on the trail itself, where you may find the space you want to take blocked. It looks stunning but as an experience it feels lacking in dynamism: no surprises, no laughter. But that said as a friendly, well-dressed family game that doesn't take long to play, it might be a good fit for families who don't seek confrontation in their games. Certainly looks great on the table!