Visiting Parks

Parks, from Keymaster Games, takes the idea of exploring the evocative beauty of Americas National Parks and turns it into a gentle resource collection worker placement game for one to five players.

Playing out across four seasons you start each round at base camp with a pair of hiker meeples aiming to travel them both across that seasons path of trail tiles, collecting resources and performing actions as you go. Once each hiker get to the end of the trail they can spend any collected goodies to visit Parks or buy Gear cards giving you end game points and special abilities. Once all players have finished that season an extra trail tile is added to the set, the whole trail is shuffled, dealt and the next season starts.

Thematically, despite the shift in continent, the obvious comparison is that other beautiful 'walking' game Tokaido. Parks shares its central movement idea of allowing you to travel as far along the path each turn as you see fit, the only limiting factor being what you're missing out on along the way. Interestingly though, where Tokaido can feel a little light on actual game mechanisms at times Parks manages to add in genuine crunch to the mix to make it far more thinky than it initially sounds.

Personal end of year goals give each player objectives to complete to top up their end game points, seasonal weather patterns reward the first visitor to a trail token with additional resources, canteen cards allow you to spend a water resource to gain an instant reward and grabbing the camera token lets you to take pictures of your trip as yet another way of scoring end game points.

Each player also has double sided a campfire token that you can flip, once per season, to the extinguished side to allow your hiker to visit a currently occupied trail tile which adds a lovely little bit of movement flexibility into things.

Played with two players all this adds up to a relaxing resource collection puzzle, top that player count up to four or five though and it becomes way more cutthroat as you're blocked from trail spots more often (meaning you really have to weigh up when to use your campfire) and see Parks cards you've been working for nabbed by other players. All player counts are a lot of fun but it’s worth considering that if you're less keen on that kind of direct interaction you may enjoy higher player counts less. 

It'd be madness to discuss Parks without referring to the games production values, this is a small box game that oozes quality from every inch. From the beautiful Game Trayz inserts shaped like logs to the fact each wooden wildlife meeple is unique for no gameplay reason other than it looks and feels cool. Everything inside the box is designed perfectly and the artwork on the Parks cards themselves is beautiful.

In fact, beautiful is a good word to describe Parks, it looks beautiful and it plays beautifully. Its light enough that it could almost be a gateway game yet it has enough moving parts to still give more experienced gamers something to think about, especially at higher player counts. To top it all off it comes in a box just the right size to be tucked into a suitcase making it an ideal game to take on holiday.