Topiary: the art or practice of clipping shrubs or trees into ornamental shapes.

After playing this game I’d love to go and see some of the awesome sculptures you can see on Google. But I hope they don’t put the little ones behind the bigger ones.

Let’s look at this cute, and quite mean, tile laying game.

In Topiary, players try to position their visitors on the outer edge of a beautiful topiary garden in order to give them the best view possible. Visitors can see the closest topiary sculpture to them and any behind that, in the same sight line, that are larger.

Topiary Review

My first impressions of Kingdom Run including a brief overview of gameplay followed by my final summary.

TL:DR Play a worker to manipulate and collect trees in a Topiary to make sure your Meeples get the best view of the Garden.

Summary

This is a nice and unique game. It’s a worker placement game that affects a certain tile depending on where the meeple is played.

I can’t really compare it to anything… Maybe Spyrium? That’s the mechanically closest game I can think of. Here you play Meeples to take cards based on adjacency… Close enough 🙂

Let’s address the cuteness of this game!

The little Meeples are cute and a different sculpt for each player’s colour. Despite being small they do the job. You need to be able to see which way they’re facing and you can, easily.

The art is cute too. The little Topiary trees (if that’s what they’re called) look adorable. Also, you can find REAL versions of these online if you look.

The gameplay is cool too. You can flip up a tile and help yourself, but you also give information to the other players. So you have to think not just what that tile is worth to you, but how can everyone else use it? This leads to a lot of choices and headaches around what you want to d on your turn.

Scoring only trees you can see and the ‘height’ of them mattering is genius too.

Jesta ThaRogue