How To Play Beacon Patrol

One brief glance at Beacon Patrol, and I’d forgive you for assuming it was a Carcassonne-at-sea impersonator. Yes, it is a tile placement game, with small square tiles, and you need to match up certain terrains. However! Beacon Patrol (by Pandasaurus Games) differs in many ways.

You and your fellow players (it plays 1-4) are Coast Guard captains, exploring the North Sea coast. There’s plenty of buoys and lighthouses out there, and it’s your job to ‘explore and inspect’ them all. The biggest sidestep from Carcassonne is that Beacon Patrol is a cooperative game. (You can even play it as a solo challenge.) Can you rack up a top score that the residents of the North Sea coast will talk about for years to come?

How Do We Win Beacon Patrol?

So, how do you win? The placement of your tiles gets scored at the end of the game. There’s five ranks of scoring. Depending on how many points you earn, that equals your score rank. You need to get 56+ points to get the top title of ‘Cartographers’… But that’s easier said than done!

What you’re looking to do is surround special tiles. Having tiles connected on all four edges (up, down, left, right) means you have Explored that tile. That then means you’ll score that tile at the end of the game. Sounds easy… right?

Out Of The Jetty: Setting Up The Game

Setting up Beacon Patrol is easy. There’s one Beacon Patrol HQ tile, which is the solitary tile that needs to start on the table. It’s the same size as all the others, so you might not see it at a glance among the 54 other tiles! The best way to locate it in a snap is to look at the tile-backs. (The standard tiles have a blue circular sonar-like design on them. The Beacon Patrol HQ tile has a white anchor on it.)

There’s nine expansion tiles that come with the Beacon Patrol base game. They have windmills and piers on them. If it’s your first time playing, you could consider leaving them in the box for now. (Don’t worry; they’re not mega-complex, and I’ll also explain how they work later on in this guide!) Assort the remaining 54 square tiles into a few random stacks, face-down.

Then give each player a ship of their colour choice, alongside a player reference sheet. (Also matching their colour; so they can remember which ship is theirs.) Each player then places their ship on the starting Beacon Patrol HQ tile. Then everyone draws tiles from the public stacks, and Movement Tokens. (Quantities of both depend on player count. In a three-player game, for example, players get three tiles and three Movement Tokens.) Keep your tiles face-up, so everyone can see them. Have your Movement Tokens sit the blue propellor side up.

Any unused ships and Movement Tokens for your player count can go back in the box. Right, it’s time to play! Which one of you last visited the sea? You’re the first player!

Out At Sea: What Do I Do On My Turn?

On your turn, there are three actions that you can take. These are: place a tile, move your ship, and swap a tile with another player. Remember, Beacon Patrol is a co-op game. You’re working together as a team to place (and Explore around) these tiles. You don’t have to do all three actions – but the choices are there if you want them! Let’s take a look at these actions in a bit more detail.

Place A Tile

The heart of the game is placing tiles, so you’ll look to do this in the smartest way possible! If you like, you can place one, two or all three of your tiles, in any order of your choice. When it comes to placing a tile, the first thing to pay attention to is the orientation. See the little black arrow in the corner? It must always be in the top-right corner, pointing ‘up’. This means you cannot rotate tiles 90°/180°/270°/360° to make them fit, like you can in Carcassonne. Forget Carcassonne! You’re in Beacon Patrol’s house, now!

Second, when placing a tile, it must always sit adjacent (not diagonal) to your ship’s current tile. (Current = the tile where your ship sits right now.) Even if it’s a perfect fit for a spot elsewhere on the tile layout… tough! Talking of ‘perfect fit’: yes, when placing a tile, adjacent terrains need to match up. That means water needs to sit next to water; land needs to sit next to land. (“That sounds like Carcass–” Sigh, all right, yes, that bit does take a leaf out of Carcassonne’s book.)

But wait! There’s more. When placing a tile next to your ship, you must then move your ship onto that placed tile. And – here’s the crucial bit – it must move by sea, not hopping over land. Ships want to be on the waves; their natural habitat is not crossing terra firma! This is the part of Beacon Patrol that might confuse die-hard Carcassonne fans. “Why not? The tile is adjacent, and I’ve matched the terrains up nice and neat!” I find (as with many games) if you explain rules like this with theme in mind, it makes a lot more sense.

Placing a tile, when you obey all the above, means that you have moved your ship, too. Moving via a tile placement is mandatory. However, there is another way to move your ship…

Move Your Ship

At any time on your turn in Beacon Patrol (before you’ve even placed a tile) you may spend a Movement Token to move your ship. Flip one of your Movement Tokens from its blue propellor side to its red ‘spent’ side. Then move your ship one adjacent (not diagonal) space. Again, the ship has to move across sea, not land. If you like, you may want to spend a Movement Token (or two) to relocate your ship to an optimal position. Then you can place one of your tiles adjacent to it (which then means you move your ship onto that new tile for free).

Those three Movement Tokens are there for you to spend. You get all them refreshed (flipped back to blue) at the start of your next turn. So don’t be afraid to use them to navigate your way around the North Sea into better positions! You can even throw away one of your tiles (back into the box) to move one extra space. If you like, you can do this multiple times per turn. (So in a three-player game you could, in theory, throw away two tiles to move two spaces. Then spend all three of your Movement Tokens to move another three spaces… And then place your final tile.)

Swap A Tile

The final option on your turn is to swap one of your tiles with another player. This has to be a mutual agreement between the two of you! Remember, it is a co-op experience, so it’s in your best interest to work together in this regard. Your tiles sit face-up throughout Beacon Patrol, so you can always check out your fellow coast guards’ options. Does one of them have the perfect tile for you, which you could better utilise this turn? And do you have a great tile for them, vice-versa, which you're not planning to use right now?

Swapping is important for two reasons. Any tiles that you do not place this turn get chucked back in the box. (You can place them all gentle and snug in there too, if you’d prefer. Besides, I’d always recommend being kind to your game’s components!) This means you cannot hoard tiles for a later moment in the game… Place them now, or lose them! But swapping a great tile with another player keeps it alive as an option for a later turn.

(Stuff that in your pipe and smoke it, Carcassonne! You can’t do that in the French countryside, can you? Just kidding. I love Carcassonne. It’s why I bought Beacon Patrol – the two of them are like odd cousins that only ever meet up on rare family gatherings, like Boxing Day.)

How Does The Game End?

Once you’ve placed your tile(s), opted to spend Movement Tokens, and opted whether to swap one of your tiles with another player, you turn ends. You flip your Movement Tokens back to blue, and you get rid of any of your tiles not placed this turn. Then you draw three new tiles from the face-down public stack (two tiles in four-player game).

It’s then the next player’s turn, clockwise. Turns continue like this until all the tiles have been either placed or discarded. Then it’s time to add up your score!

Yeah, Buoy! What Did We Score?

Remember, what you’re looking for are fully surrounded tiles. That means a tile that has another tile sitting above, below, left and right of it. These count as ‘Explored’. You score the following:

• Explored Lighthouses (including the Beacon Patrol HQ starting tile) = 3 points each
• Explored beacon buoys = 2 points each
• All other Explored tiles = 1 point each

What score did you get? If you get 56 or more points, you earn the group rank of Cartographers, which means you’re Beacon Patrol experts!

Rock The Boat With The Mini Expansions

Want to rock the boat and spice things up? (What a mixed metaphor that turned out to be!) Remember the nine mini-expansion tiles I mentioned during set-up? The ones you didn’t play with in the base game? Let’s crack them out and give them a whirl. They have Windmills (5/9) or Piers (4/9) on them. You can play with either just the piers, just the windmills, or both. Shuffle them into the other tiles and play Beacon Patrol as normal. The differences kick in with how you score Windmills and Piers at the end of the game:

• Explored Windmills score 1 point per tile that surrounds it - providing those tiles are ‘open water’. (Meaning no land on the tile.) Open Water tiles include buoys, the Beacon Patrol HQ tile and other windmills themselves.
• Explored Piers score one point. They also score one extra point per building on the entirety of the land with which they’re on. You don’t need to ‘complete’ the landmass itself to score this. (Like I’ve said before… this ain’t no Carcassonne city scoring, here!)

The scoring brackets are higher with the expansion tiles in Beacon Patrol. The expectancy being, of course, you should score a larger total! If you play with one of these mini-expansions, to get the top score you’ll need to get 66+ points. Play with both and you’ll need 76+ points! Good luck, cartographers…