Parks Second Opinion

Parks is a wonderful game – but what is it trying to tell me about nature tourism?

Parks is a very beautiful game about very beautiful places. Generously large cards depict every one of America’s national parks with colourful lightly abstract sketches. These artworks emphasise the building blocks that national parks have been distilled into – sun, water, mountains, and forests, the game’s resources – and come with matching ‘visiting’ costs. Visiting more and bigger parks (which mechanically is like buying them, but the rulebook sternly insists is not in fact like buying) is the players’ central goal, achieved over several rounds (or ‘seasons’) of travel. As well as visiting parks, players take photos of vistas – represented by adorable little wooden photo frames – collect wildlife tokens – little wooden silhouettes of keystone species which can count for any resource type – and deliver on personal objectives representing their hiking styles.

One season is kind of like a hiking trip, with hikers moving through a randomised sequence of terrains called the trail. Players’ two hikers must complete the trail, moving as many spaces as they want but only picking up resources from terrains stopped in along the way. You generally must move forward every turn, but light a fire once per season to stick around in a favoured spot. The resources (experience? National park knowhow? Passion for nature? It isn’t quite clear what these represent) required to visit other parks can’t be gained by rushing through the trail, head down and hood up – nature must be appreciated, slowly. Race through and you will have first pick of the parks to visit – but will inevitably lack the means to get there, forcing players to reserve parks for later rounds. Make it a leisurely stroll, and you might not get to your first choice park, but at season’s end you could visit several parks and purchase gear that gives bonuses for later seasons.

This tension between rushing and strolling is the core mechanic of Parks, one which gives it its gameplay depth. Complicating things further, no two hikers can occupy the same space, so you won’t always be able to visit the part of the trail you want. This adds complications in various ways – it could be your own hikers that blocks the path for the other, requiring planning ahead on the squares you need most, or it could be an opponent forcing you to rush ahead to another piece of paradise, albeit one that’s not quite what you need. Particularly in higher player count games, occupying space others want for as long as possible and engineering space for yourself is the sun the game revolves around, and the mostly no-secrets open play makes it a great game for tactical play. Strictly the game has no direct interaction, and players operate independently – but the indirect ways players can shape the board for others allows for some fantastic moments of tactical deduction, trading off the implications of actions for yourself and opponents.

My problems arise not from the game but from how completely at odds it is with the thematic underpinnings. Even the very idea of visiting national parks being a competitive exercise had my eyes raised, but Parks is littered with ideas that seem odd for a nature game. Exploring national parks is zero sum here, with nothing to be gained if two hikers have to coexist in the same enormous forest, and no possibility for two people to visit the same park. Lighting up my fire to get one more turn on a spot I knew my opponent needed felt like great gameplay, but an evil representation of hiking. Reserving a national park so nobody else can visit it is a sentence I have to check several times to ensure it makes sense. This is a bizarrely exclusive way of thinking about nature tourism.

Taking pictures for points is a nice addition, but even that has a deeply competitive element. Players compete for the camera token, indicating they are on a roll and can take photos for less – but take all your pictures quickly, otherwise another play will snatch the camera off you. Enormous effort has been put into the games’ wonderful art and tokens. But the gameplay mechanics and thematic metaphors that sit atop them are either careless, or designed to push a theory of nature tourism few would subscribe to.

It’s okay to not care about this – at it’s heart Parks is a good game with interesting decisions and tradeoffs, particularly at higher player counts. For many tables that will be enough, and I certainly enjoyed my time playing Parks. It’s after the session, thinking about it more and explaining it to others, that it started to let me down. Because if you want your games to not just be visually thematic, but tell you something thematic, Parks falls well short. In this age of board games the bar

is being raised, with a good theme meaning harmony between message, mechanics and theme. Unfortunately, for Parks, these three stand decidedly apart.

65/100

5* artwork, 2* complexity, 4* replayability, 3* player interaction, 4* component quality

Like

– Wonderful art and components

– Hiker placement game has surprising depth

– Supplementary goals and randomised board make it very repayable

Dislike

– Mechanics don’t mesh well with the theme

– Can be more competitive than it’s relaxed visuals suggests

– Games can sometime run a little long

– Core mechanics don’t work as well at lower player counts