Meeple Land Board Game First Impressions

Meeple Land is a game of building a theme park to make your arriving meeples happy.

Can you do it? Or will you leave them outside?

Build the most renowned amusement park of all time in Meeple Land! Buy the most beautiful attractions, offer the best services, and accommodate as many meeples as possible with buses and advertising. Meet the expectations of the meeples, and success will be yours! Do not neglect any of your meeples, however, for the unsatisfied ones will tarnish your reputation.

Meeple Land Game Play

There is the main board in the middle of the table where bus cards are placed with a matching number and colour of meeples placed on them. There are also 5 small, 5 medium and 3 small park attraction tiles laid out on the table.

A game is played over 4 rounds and at the start of each round players will get an amount of income. This amount starts at $15 in round one and decreases each round with round 4 seeing the players get nothing.

On a players turn, they either buy a tile, advertise or pass.

To buy a tile, they pick one from those available, pay the cost and add it to the park. They must go next to a park entrance or next to another tile. To place a service tile (restaurants etc) they must connect via their paths to an adjacent attraction.

Tiles can be laid in any orientation you like. Not all paths on the tile need to line up with the adjacent tile as long as at least one of them does.

If you buy an advertisement you get the indicated meeples shown on the tile, place them at your park entrance.

The final actions are to buy a park extension giving you more room to build on, a second park entrance or to pass if there is nothing else you can do.

If you pass, you take one of the bus cards and all meeples on it.

End of Round

When everyone has passed, players welcome visitors. Visitors waiting at the park entrance and on the bus the player just acquired are then placed on attractions. They go on a free space matching that meeples colour. Some visitors require a certain service adjacent to that attraction so look out for that.

Then players get their round income plus $1 for each meeple in their park. The player with the least money is the new start player and a new round begins. After 4 rounds the game ends.

Players get points for the number of different attractions in their park, 1 or 2 points per visitor in the park depending on their colour and minus points for each visitor at the entrance. You also lose points for each path that is cut off by not connecting to another path on an adjacent tile.

The player with the most points, which is the park’s reputation, is the winner.

Theme

Anything with a theme park will get my attention. I assume meeples colours are related to different types of people how like different types of rides? I didn’t check that.

Setup

This is all straightforward. There’s almost as much to fiddle with between rounds as at the beginning of the game.

Components & Artwork

Everything here is OK and nice but pretty standard.

The art on the attractions is cute. I’m not sure if there is any hidden detail on the rides that’s worth looking for.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

Simple enough! The hardest part is working out what is needed for each attraction to put a meeple on it.

It’s all open information anyway so players not getting it can be helped easily enough,

Meeple Land Summary

The obvious comparison to me is Steam Park. Here you are building a theme park, adding meeples of the correct colour to rides for income but that is a real-time game. It’s also 3D so it looks more impressive on the table.

I demoed this at Uk Games Expo and only played 3 of the 4 rounds and didn’t score the game “officially”. That’s a good thing, demos at cons SHOULD be truncated so more people can have a go.

But it does mean I didn’t play the game with many strategies in mind, not that I do anyway. But I wasn’t too worried about not connecting paths so I didn’t look at paths for tiles I was buying. I did look at my queue and the busses available to see what colour meeples I needed for any attractions I could buy.

But I wasn’t thinking about buying different types of attractions or looking at the value of the meeples I could be targetting.

I mean, the demo did its job in making me interested in the game and in a previous life I would have bought it ASAP. But I’m not that guy anymore 🙂

I do like tile-laying games like this and the added fun of the theme, cute meeples and very strategic play makes it one I will look at more in the future.

Jesta ThaRogue