Reykholt Board Game First Impressions

Reykholt sees you growing veggies in greenhouses to feed tables.

How fun.

Growing tomatoes, lettuce, or carrots on Iceland? What an absurd idea!

But still, whoever had that idea was a genius! Geothermal energy on the island allows you to cultivate the most unexpected fruits and vegetables — an oddity that no tourist would want to miss.

Reykholt Game Overview

Quick Rules Summary

Players take turns placing a worker pawn on a board with 24 spaces.

These mostly allow you to take greenhouse tiles so you have more room to grow stuff. You can take vegetables, seed them in the greenhouse (which allows you to add one of that vegetable from the supply) or harvest them from a greenhouse.

Once everyone has placed all of their workers, everyone harvests 1 vegetable from each of their full greenhouses.

Then in the tourist phase, players pay the number of vegetables from their supply shown on the next table around the edge of the board to move on to it. They can do this as many times as they can as long as they have enough vegetables to pay the cost to advance.

How do you win?

After 7 rounds, the player that has made it furthest around the tables is the winner.

Main Mechanisms

Worker placement obviously, but also resource management. You need to plan the seeding and harvesting so you have the ones you need to move around the tables.

USP

Nothing here. It’s one of those Uwe Rosenberg that has bits of other games in it.

Theme

I like the theme of geothermal farming in Iceland! Shame the game doesn’t reference it at all.

Setup

You just put bits on the table, nothing bad here.

Components & Artwork

Very standard stuff, even the workers are those from Agricola. The veggie pieces are OK.

The art is very Klemens Franz and it’s still not my style, very dull.

Ease of Teaching

Everything is open information and the spaces on the worker placement section are straightforward.

Similar Games

Any medium/light worker placement game really. There are a lot out there, most made by Uwe.

Reykholt Review

Positives

When the plan goes off and you nail a few tables in one go it’s satisfying.

Negatives

I question getting no bonus from going last in turn order in round one.

It plays fairly dull.

It looks fairly dull.

There isn’t anything interesting.

Reykholt Summary

Meh.

Jesta ThaRogue