Compete with your friends/families to visit the most U.S. National Parks in Parks (2nd Edition), as you control hikers along the trail to visit the 63 U.S. National Parks across 3 seasons (rounds)! With new gameplay additions from the first edition and all-new stunning artworks for all cards by Josh Emrich and Lisk Feng, this game is sure to impress anyone with its stunning visuals and thematically captivating gameplay.
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Unboxing
Front cover of Box (This copy was the Base Camp Edition), depicting Yellowstone National Park
Upon lifting the lid, we are greeted by the intro text ‘Parks’ on the box, overlayed by the visuals of the main box art. There is also a promo art card of Yellowstone National Park, ‘The World’s First National Park’ and a brochure of Keymaster Games’ other offerings.
The inner organisers of the box allow for each game piece to fit snugly within the contents of the box and the game can be packed pretty smoothly and intuitively.
One thing to note about the box is that the cover is thinner than the main box compartment, which gives the illusion of a lid lift. However, this is intended from the design of the box. Despite having quite a sizeable amount of content and game pieces, the box is relatively small (27cm x 27cm x 7cm) and light at 1.5kg. This makes it quite convenient to bring around for outings or game sessions with friends as it can be packed in your backpack or carried with relative ease.
Gameplay Overview
The game follows a relatively simple gameplay loop: Each player controls 2 hikers and take turns hiking across the 9 trail spots on the game board, where they can only move forward until they reach the trail end. Along the way, they will pick up resources like sunlight and water or purchase gear to power up their hiking abilities. They may then use these resources to visit National Parks or take photographs, both of which are worth Victory Points. This continues for 3 seasons (rounds), where each season has a random objective for players to aim for, rewarding them with resources, powers or Victory Points during the last season (Autumn).
At the end of the game, players tally their total points from their visited parks, photographs, season and passion rewards and the player who gained the most points wins!
Players start with 2 hikers each at the trail head and takes turns moving hikers along the trail path to collect resources and visit parks.
A full setup of the Game board. In this shot, players are completing their final turns in the final season (Autumn) of the game, creating an intense race to gain the most points.
Learning the game together during our first playthrough! The rulebook was easy to follow and explained the game from setup instructions to mechanics well.
Gameplay Mechanics
The game combines several elements of the various board game genres naturally such as engine-building and worker placement. As the game progresses, players will purchase more gear, unlocking more benefits as they hike along the trail path. They can also fill up their canteen with canteen tokens, which gives benefits like more resources or more actions when gaining a water resource and assigning it to their canteen. This is akin to slowly building an engine and if you plan it right, you can easily chain gears and canteen actions to have monster turns where you gain multiple resources and take multiple Parks actions in one turn, albeit the engine building aspect is quite simplified and barebones.
The hiking mechanic also resembles Worker Placement, as players cannot place a hiker on a trail path if there is already a hiker there UNLESS they extinguish their campfire (a once-per-season action). This creates situations where you have to contend with other players to reach certain trail paths first to lock them out of it, allowing for a greater element of player interaction. Your opponent has a backpack full of resources and needs to clear them by visiting Parks? Just ‘park’ your hiker at the Parks trail path and force them to extinguish their campfire or take a series of suboptimal actions while waiting for you to vacate the path.
A sample player board set-up, taken from my first game. As a Passion for Photography, I ended up specialising into taking as many photographs as I could!
The player board is nicely set up for players to store their resources in their backpack, fill their canteen with canteen tokens and showcase their taken photographs/visited parks.
Randomised Objectives
During game setup, a random objective is drawn for each season, resulting in a fresh new game of Parks each time you play. Each player also gets a random Passion card, which details a personal objective they should try to achieve that game using one of the game’s mechanics. Upon fulfilling their Passion, players are granted a powerful benefit such as an active benefit while hiking or an end-of-game Victory Points generator. For my first game session, my passion was photography, allowing me to take an extra photograph each time I took a photograph action. This resulted in me ending the game with something like 30 photographs while the others had a combined total of 7. Cool! These randomised seasonal objectives and personal Passion cards allow for each new game of Parks to feel different and add a little asymmetry between each player.
Player Count
Parks can be played anywhere between 1 to 5 players, with a solo ‘solitaire’ mode allowing players to rack up points and compare to a scoreboard. Since I do not own the game, I did not get to try the solo mode.
Each additional player adds more player interaction and accentuates the Worker Placement mechanic, since there are more hikers competing on the same 9 trail spots. I’d say the sweet spot for player count lies somewhere in the middle, with the best player count being 3 players with 2/4 players not far behind. BoardGameGeek’s community ratings seem to agree with me too.
General Thoughts
Things I really liked
Cover art of Yellowstone National Parks, by Josh Emrich
Design: One huge plus point for Parks is, to the surprise of no one, the design and aesthetics of this game. Everyone who I played this game with commented on how visually stunning the artwork and gameplay pieces are. Each of the National Parks cards are designed with this simplistic, woody grainy art style that evokes a retro nostalgic feel to them. Thematically, Keymaster Games knocked it out of the ‘Park’ with this design.
The interview piece with Josh Emrich by More Games Please goes in-depth into the design philosophy and process of reimagining the National Parks and is a very valuable read. I have seen comments from users online who say the First Edition was better designed as well, however as I have not played it before I cannot compare the two editions.
Game Mechanics: Another aspect I liked was the gameplay mechanics. As mentioned above, the game blends several mechanics like Engine building and Worker placement together in a light approach. This allows for people who are relatively new to the hobby to easily pick this game up and understand how to play, while being exposed to several mechanics in board games. From there, you can understand what type of games you’d like more and slowly get into more complex games.
Playtime: The gameplay duration is also fairly short, with my 4-player game with newcomers taking around 10-15 minutes to learn and 1 to 1.5 hours to play.
Things I didn’t like as much
Snowball Effect: One thing that felt consistent through subsequent playthroughs was the snowballing effect: There is really little you can do to stop a player who manages to build a solid engine through picking up the right gear pieces at the start. Anecdotally, it felt like most game outcomes were predictable around the midway point of Summer, where some players who were lagging behind in points/gear just had no way of contending for the 1st Place title by then. I’m not sure if this was just my personal experience, but I have read reviews from BoardGameGeek that the 2nd Edition already balances the game more compared to the 1st.
Gear Cards are quite uninspiring: This is a nitpick at this point but I felt like the Gear cards, while having great designs and were powerful, felt same-y in effects. It almost always just gave you extra resources at a particular trail path or other actions. This results in gear that are just objectively better than others (especially in the 3 face-up gear cards). I’d have liked more variety in Gear effects that made the decision space more interesting, compared to the Passion cards which felt like they often shaped the strategy you’d aim for in that game session.
Conclusion
This game is most definitely for you if you are a fan of the U.S. National Parks! Parks (2nd Edition) is a visually stunning and thematic game that is sure to attract the attention of players, and its simplicity allows it to be picked up by newcomers to the hobby easily. If you’d like to pick it up for yourself, Parks is available for purchase here at MeepleWares!
Any comments or thoughts? Feel free to let me know in the comments section below!
