How to Play Project L & Review

Project L is an action point allowance, pattern building game.

Title: Project L

Year Published: 2020

Designer: Michal Mikeš, Jan Soukal, Adam Spanel

Publisher: Boardcubator

Players: 1-4

Game Time: ~40 mins

Set-up Time: ~2 mins

Ages: 13+

Theme: Abstract

Mechanisms: Action Points, Card Drafting, Pattern Building, Tile Placement

How to win: Score the most points by completing puzzles.

Game Description

Build pieces, develop an engine, perfect your strategy, and win the game!

How to play Project L

A quick how to play video for Project L.

Theme

Erm.. Non to speak of really.

Setup & Rulebook

The setup is very simple, tip out the bits and pile up the boards.

The slight delay in having to look up the table to see how many black sided boards are put in play is off-balanced by the first player being randomly assigned. No arguing or “The player that looks most like a Tetromino goes first” nonsense.

The cheat sheets not only assign the first player marker but also do the job. They contain all the information in its basic form which really helps the game move along.

It also contains all the info for available expansions, slightly annoying if you don’t have them but very helpful if you do I would guess?

Components & Artwork

These are great.

The dual-layer boards do a great job of holding the pieces and the bright Tetris pieces are very sturdy.

The contrast of the bright coloured pieces and the jet black puzzles makes the colour pop and it looks great.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

The game is easy to teach as the basic principals make sense, “Get bits, add bits, fill the white bit”.

Also, the help sheet has every action listed on it along with a brief reminder of what each action does. There is enough info to help people along without overdoing it with less often used rules and exceptions.

Project L Summary

There are plenty of games where you play Tetrominoes or Polyominoes into an area to achieve a goal. Patchwork springs to mind as a fun Polyominoes game and also Bärenpark, but that could also be because it was mentioned during my recent play of Project L.

Bärenpark also has the similarity of your current action informing your next action. In Project L, the puzzles give a good balance of points vs reward pieces. A low scoring tile will give a higher level piece and vice-versa so you have to balance that engine as you go.

So do you quickly smash out a bunch of small puzzles, or slowly complete a bunch of large ones, or try and get a balance… What do you do? As someone who is terrible at the game, don’t ask me! 🙂

People who are better than me seem to balance the two and look to get a good balance of points and reward pieces used to fill those larger, point heavy puzzles later on.

This is where the Master Action comes into play. Allowing you to play one piece in each incomplete puzzle you have available could mean 4 actions for the price of just 1 action point, that’s handy!

More plays needed by me to get the strategy down or at least challenge for first place… but I will enjoy those plays!

Round-Up

A very nice mix of a puzzle game with an important engine building element that you can’t ignore.

Rating I give it 7/10