Placing tiles on your board works differently to most polyomino puzzles in that they cannot touch each other. You will also need to avoid trees and maximise bonuses on your board. Give up any regular token and exchange it for a different regular token type of your choice. You can do this twice. More than once while playing Tenpenny Parks, someone compared its Tetris-like puzzle to A Feast for Odin, a much heavier game which features polyominoes and worker placement and buying side boards to continue building polyominoes across your tableau. Filling parks with attractions is perhaps the heartiest puzzle in Tenpenny Parks, but takes only one or two tries to solve. Players, myself included, usually fall for the trap of using concessions to grab early placement bonuses, before realizing there’s no longer any room for attractions. Once you’ve learned from that mistake and familiarize yourself with the placement rules, you’ve mastered Tenpenny Parks.

There is a lot to like about Tenpenny Parks. I love how streamlined the gameplay is, it offers up the same worker placement anxiety as something like Viticulture. You will weigh up and prioritise which of the few spaces you want, knowing the likelihood is, what you don’t choose could and probably will be taken away from you. If that sounds like it won’t frustrate you, Tenpenny Parks is an easy game to recommend. For guidance, let’s use the BGG “complexity” rating: the majority of my gaming friends like their games in the 3.5 range and above. Great Western Trail is an ideal starting point for these groups (a BGG average complexity rating of 3.71). It has lots of complex decisions, lots of rules, lots of processes, and requires multiple plays to get the overarching strategies honed correctly.

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Why do you want these tokens? Remember, you want to buy Park cards. Each of the three Park cards that you dealt during set-up states the number of tokens required to Visit it. They’re worth varying victory points. The more points they are worth, the tougher token requirements, or quantity. I’ll explain how you claim these cards later. But first… Let me take a selfie! Swig Your Water And Take Memories With You Players can then choose to pay money to advertise their attractions. Each attraction has a different advertising cost and each attraction can only be advertised once per round. Advertising attractions will generate points. Her Comments: Mechanically this game does not break a lot of new ground. It feels familiar, but it does all work together. The stunning art direction comes from the Fifty-Nine Parks team. Your two hikers trek the span of the United States of America. You’ll marvel at the charming wooden components that sit inside the classy Gametrayz insert. You’ll bask in the phenomenal visuals on the 48 Park cards up for grabs. You’ll nod your head in satisfaction at the class that oozes out of this title from Keymaster Games. While you might not be in said breathtaking locations, you’ll make memories of your own when playing Parks. Lastly, during the Cleanup Step the available concessions get refreshed, workers are returned, the carousel is rotated by the new start player (by rotating the carousel certain attractions on display will get a discount while others get a price increase) and the month marker is advanced.

Each player gets a Campfire and two Hiker meeples of their colour. Their Hikers start on the Trailhead tile. Assign a starting player and give them the triangular First Hiker Marker. The player to the right of the First Hiker starts with the Camera. That’s set-up complete: now it’s time to start trekking! Let’s learn how to play Parks. And Now For Something Completely British: What’s The Weather Like? I play games with 4 different groups in the greater Chicago area. Three of these groups prefer midweight-to-heavy strategy games, often dense, rules-heavy experiences.But I lean light. I definitely lean lighter than A Feast for Odin (a BGG complexity of 3.85), and I struggle to get games like it to the table when I’m not playing with my heavy strategy gaming friends. The trail gets longer with each passing season. With the start of a new season, the trail tiles get shuffled and re-laid out, along with an extra tile. No two hikers can share the same spot, so it’s first-come, first-served. Unless, that is, you want to use your Campfire token. But you only get one of these per season, so light it with care! Also, if you can fill a Canteen with a water token you get access to harder-to-come-by memories. Other Gear cards offer further engine building options. How will you trek through the PARKS? Again, Tenpenny Parks is the simplest euro style game I’ve played. For the record, I love simplicity in principle, especially when applied with precision, but simplicity can easily suffocate game design, which I will argue happens here. Tenpenny’s worker placement remains the obvious example. Worker placement without a limit of one worker per location is just vanilla action selection with extra steps. Thus, Tenpenny Parks is more an action selection game with a small zest of worker placement for one particular action. It’s got the flavor without any substance, like hotdog water.

Construct rides through the stone age, the American old west, the age of fantasy, the cosmos of space, and the depths of the sea!There is a slight question mark over the replayabilty of Tenpenny Parks, I could see it becoming a bit repetitive if it wasn’t mixed in with plays of other games, but as it doesn’t take too long, it will always be welcome at my table. In Tenpenny Parks players are competing to build the best amusement park that gives thrills, creates awe, and sparks joy. This is accomplished through the mechanisms of worker placement and tile placement. At the beginning of the game each player gets a player board, three workers, seven money, and three goal cards. Players will keep two of these goal cards which will score three points each at the end of the game. The game is played over five rounds. Advertising: Each of your rides will let you spend money to gain VPs. The ratio will depend on the ride built. My Comments: I think that worker placement and polyomino title placement is a good combination. Both of these mechanisms are very tactical while still requiring players to think strategically about what is happening next.

Secondly, the overall strategy of Tenpenny Parks fully reveals itself after only two or three plays. In a game with greater complexity, players can experiment with varying strategies and, ideally, leave the game with thoughts about what they would try differently next time. But in a system as simple as in Tenpenny Parks, players can try everything there is to try in only two games. Tiles can be placed differently, and decisions regarding emotion bonuses can differ, but that’s pretty much the fullest extent. Looking at the busy and intricate box art now, I almost feel lied to. Visiting People, conveniently abbreviated to VP are the victory points in the game. The player with the most at the end of the game will be crowned victor. To visit a park, you must spend the resources listed on the Park’s card, that card then being worth points at the end of the game. Of course, you may find a Park that will benefit your end-game bonus but you can’t afford to visit it. You can then look at reserving the Park, ready for visiting at a later point throughout the game.So double-knot your laces and fill up your canteen with water (or something stronger, we won’t judge). Leave the map at home. Let’s go for a wonderful, meandering hike along the trails within these areas of natural beauty. Join me as we learn how to play Parks! How Do You Win? It would be a leap to say that if you love A Feast for Odin, you’ll love Tenpenny Parks. The complexity is dialed WAY down in Tenpenny Parks. As a result, Tenpenny Parks is also a much, much shorter game. My first two games of Tenpenny Parks were played in about 90 minutes total at three players. I’ve never played a three-player game of A Feast for Odin in less than two hours. At the time of writing, we’re still in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Trips away and idyllic plans got put on pause. We’ve had to cancel holidays, and travelling to far-flung places is a case of fuhgeddaboudit. It’s fortunate then that Parks allows you to visit national parks around the US, from the comfort of your own home. If you’re not familiar with this game already, fear not. I’ll be explaining how to play Parks from set-up to conclusion. Play begins with everyone taking their first income of 3 dollars. As for actions, players have three workers to place between five types: builder, banker, arborist, contractor, and realtor. The builder spaces appear on a rotating carousel within the board and each corresponds to an attraction for sale. Each builder space on the carousel is marked by a unique price adjuster that increases or decreases the cost of respective attractions. When workers are placed here, the player pays for the corresponding attraction and places the unique attraction piece into their park board. When placing tiles, players cannot build on top of trees, and tiles may only touch diagonally. Importantly, the builder spots are the only spots that follow the traditional worker placement rule of allowing only one worker; the rest can hold any number. All of this creates a thoroughly enjoyable quandary. What to focus on, what to spend and when. It all really makes the cogs whir. I don’t know another game where four moves with limited choice can burn the brain so much!