Enchanting, picturesque, and calming: PARKS by Keymaster Games is a board game with a feel much like that of Tokaido but with a North American setting and artwork.
The game at a glance:
- 1-5 Player Game
- 45min+ depending on number of players
- Currently Shipping Kickstarter, with retail release planned for later this fall
The goal of the game is for players to complete a year of hiking and visiting US National Parks across four seasons. Each season allows players to move one of their two hikers across a trail that grows and changes each season. New tiles are added and the tiles are rearranged to keep the same strategy from working twice. Victory points are scored by visiting national parks using a resource called memories, taking pictures, and completing secret objectives each player starts with at the beginning of the game.
Like Tokaido, PARKS is an artistically beautiful game. The artwork, featuring art from the Fifty-Nine Parks Print Series, is fantastic. Each US National Park card also has a sentence or two about the park and where it is located. The parks are visited by first collecting resources (memories) along the way. Landing on certain tiles in the trail will earn certain memories such as forests, mountains, sunshine, water, or other powers. Wild animals also act as wild resources, to be used in place of harder to find memories like forests or mountains. Canteens make use of relatively abundant water for a once a turn exchange (pictured below, exchanging water in a canteen for two suns, a wild, or a mountain).
Once a player has collected enough resources, they move one of their hikers to the end of the trail. The end of the trail has different options to end a turn. Options include visiting a park (thereby scoring the points), reserving a park if one does not have enough resources to visit it, or buying gear. Gear can help reduce the cost of parks, provide additional canteens, or grant other abilities to help the player have the best year visiting parks they can.
The nuances of moving along each trail is what creates an engaging have experience. A player can move their hikers to any space along the trail that is unoccupied, but cannot move backwards. To move to an occupied space on the trail a player must exhaust their campfire. Their campfire is relit once one of their hiker tokens reaches the end of the trail. This means a player can potentially stop at occupied spaces twice over their turn.
After my play-through at GenCon, I found a player’s strategy seemed to bend towards the private objective they started the game with. Mine was to collect as many parks with 4 or 5 points as I could, so I aimed to collect 4 or 5 point parks. I only visited a 3 point park when it was the best and only option to get additional points for the end of the game. I never made use of the camera to take pictures as I was using all my resources to get parks since those actions did not contribute to my strategy. However, other players were working on taking pictures to fulfill their secret objectives so we rarely overlapped. Since players can occupy the same spaces there isn’t the element of taking a space that someone needs away like there is in Tokaido (at least not so long as the player has an unexhausted campfire).
I’d recommend this game to a group that is looking for a beautiful, meditative game. While technically competitive, the private objectives made me feel like I wasn’t competing directly against everyone until the last round. I was more concerned about visiting parks I visited in real life, or cards with artwork I appreciated. The rules were also fairly easy to grasp. Once the first season was over we were moving quickly without needing to refer to the rulebook. A game with five new players lasted just about an hour, which is definitely on par with many a game in production today. PARKS is currently available through a pre-order (backerkit), but the Kickstarter claims retail availability this fall.
Ross Blythe is a Chicago based gamer interested in all things tabletop. He enjoys reading history as well as fiction, and so has a soft spot for historical wargames like Pike & Shotte. For the campaigns he runs as a DM he often looks to history for inspiration, for the lessons of the past to challenge the players at his table.