Caldera Park

Caldera Park is a one to four player, tile laying, pattern building game designed by Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer and published by Pegasus Spiele. Caldera Park is set in the wilderness of North America, where you are tasked with creating groups of animals together in families as large as possible. These groups of animals must also have a watering hole and must avoid the bad weather.

On a player’s turn the active player will choose one of the seven possible tiles (six animals and one watering hole) and place this on one of the terrain requirements. Each player must then select one of their seven available tiles displayed atop their player board that matches the animal and place it on one of the terrain types on their own board. Each player then draws a new tile from their reserve and the active player passes on to the next player.

This is repeated until all six animals and the watering hole have been selected. At this point each player will select one of their face down weather tiles and place it on the corresponding space on their board face up. The weather tiles will have various restrictions that will trigger at the end of the game.

The game keeps going until all animal tiles have been placed and end game scoring begins. First part of end game scoring is to turn face down all animal tiles that are adjacent to a weather tile that match the symbols on the weather tile. Players score points for covering up all waterfalls, all mountain spaces, all plains spaces, all forest spaces and all rivers spaces. Points are awarded for completely surrounding a geyser and then a player’s biggest group of each animal scores. Each animal multiplied by each watering hole in that group will score points and the player with the most points wins the game.

Final Thoughts

Kiesling and Kramer are two designers that I always look out for. They create some fantastic designs between them. They often have a simple rule set but with interesting and engaging gameplay. Caldera Park is no exception.

Simple & Smooth

As you can, hopefully, gather from the above, the rules are very straight forward. Pick an animal tile and a terrain tile. Place the corresponding animal tile on your board on the matching terrain. That, in a nutshell, is basically the game. I love the simplicity of this game. The game play is smooth and the rules do not get in the way of the enjoyment of the game.

Large Families

The decisions you make in this game are, however, meaningful. You need to plan how you are going to group your animals together and to think about the placement of your watering holes. Points are awarded based on the number of the same animal multiplied by the number of watering holes. You can try and go for one or two big groupings with multiple watering holes or small groupings of different animals. This will mostly be determined by how the tiles come out and where you place them. The decision making and placement of your tiles is a very engaging puzzle.

The Weather Forecast
Spaces around the weather tile locations are risky if you have not yet placed a weather token. Sometimes you need to take the chance with the tiles available to you. There is some randomness in the game with these weather tiles as you do not use all of them in every game. However, you can mitigate this by staying away from the adjacent spaces until you have revealed the weather tile. As long as you stay away from placing animal tiles that match the weather restriction you will not suffer a penalty. I am not a big fan of the randomness of the weather tiles, but they are, in reality, pretty easy to manage/negate by simply avoiding placing tiles next to the weather spaces until you know the conditions.

There is also the additional scoring from covering up the different terrain types which need to be considered when placing. The bulk of the points will come from your animals, but the terrains give you some nice additional points to “top up” your score. At first glance, I thought the scoring would be fiddly, however it is very simple to manage and score at the end game.

There is a solo mode, which works very similar to the multiplayer game however the animal tokens you select to place on a terrain are randomised and placed face down. You reveal one, select a terrain type and place your animal. The game is multiplayer solitaire for the most part, which is why the two player or solo player count is where the game shines for me. There really isn’t much need for all four players as everyone is doing their own puzzle. You may like this, you can be left alone with no one messing up your plans to do the best you can.