PARKS Board Game First Impressions

Take a nice stroll through the US National Parks.

Keep your flask full and your campfire lit.

Players will take on the role of two hikers as they trek through different trails across four seasons of the year. While on the trail, these hikers will take actions and collect memories of the places your hikers visit.

These memories are represented by various resource tokens like mountains and forests. Collecting these memories in sets will allow players to trade them in to visit a National Park at the end of each hike.

PARKS Game Play

So cards are laid out on the mainboard which we’ll get to later. The main thing you do at the start of a round is to shuffle the trail tiles and lay them out below the board. This will set up the trail for this round showing all the different places you can visit.

A Season card is revealed and this not only gives you a bonus rule that applies only to this round but it also gives you the Weather Patten. This is a way to add additional tokens (known as Memories) to the different trail tiles.

Moving

The start player can move one of their Hikers right to ANY empty tile on the Trail. Then they take any Memories placed on that tile from the Weather Pattern and then the action of that tile. Most let you gather more of these Memories represented by Forest, Mountain Sunshine or Water tokens but there are a few others that have other abilities.

Each player has a Campfire tile and you can move a Hiker onto a tile with another Hiker only if it’s showing the lit side. If you do, you flip the Campfire face down to show it’s gone out.

Players also start with a canteen card. If a player picks up a Water token they can choose to place it in their Canteen to activate its once-per-round ability.

Players can also pay 1 Memory to take the Camera tile from a player that has it. If a player has the Camera they can pay 1 Memory to take a Photo title worth end game points.

Visiting Parks

Players take turns moving one of their Hikers. If a Hiker is moved to the end of the trail they take a special action, as well as turn their Campfire tile back to its Lit side.

The special actions are:

• Gain the First Player Marker
• Reserve a Park from those available
• Buy Gear by paying the cost in Sunshine (These give you a game long bonus)
• Visit a Park, Trade the required Memories to ‘Visit’ a face-up or reserved Park card

The spaces for some of these actions are limited, first come first served.

Once only 1 Hiker is left they move it to the Trail end, take an action and the round ends and a new Season is set up. After the 4th Season, the game ends.

Players score for the value of visited Parks, 1 point per Photo, 1 point for the first player marker and points for their Personal bonus card they received at the start of the game.

The player with the most points wins.

Theme

It’s a nice theme.

It’s not one you see too often so I’m not going to nitpick little things like everyone sharing a Camera and needing to trade a Memory to gain control of it for some reason 🙂

Setup

There are a few things to place, deal, shuffle etc It’s not that much and most of the spaces are marked so it won’t take too long.

Components & Artwork

Everything here is great. The art, especially for the Parks themselves is really really nice from Fifty-Nine Parks. But, it doesn’t get in the way of the graphic design which is really clear.

The wooden resources are really nice too and come in Gametrayz which is always good for setup and tear down.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

The main portion (Moving the Hiker, Collecting Tokens, and Visiting Parks) is fairly straightforward. There are quite a few little rules which will add to the complexity. Not a problem for experienced gamers, but new people might struggle to remember and understand everything.

Having said that, everything except that secret goal is open information so players can be helped if required.

PARKS Summary

Similar games here are obviously Tokaido, kinda. The USP of Tokaido is that the player furthest back on the trail goes next. In PARKS, players just take turns in clockwise order. But walking a beautiful trail is where the similarities really are here.

You also need to think about games like Splendor and Century: Spice Road where you’re gaining things to trade for bigger point-soring things.

Looking at both these types of games, this is my favourite of all of them. The main reason? Variability.

Not just the Trail and the available Parks, but your starting Secret Goal will change your whole game… Only if the right Parks come out though. I needed at least 5 Parks that used Water memories but I only managed to get 4 total.

The available Gear will also change up how you play and the Gear you need will also change from game to game.

Adding all of this to a very smooth and good-looking game and you have yourself a very fun one.

Jesta ThaRogue