How To Play Yak

Yak is the delightfully bonkers game of building colourful stone towers in the Himalayas, as Yak-powered carts trundle around villages. Now I love Camel Up! (the insane game of camel racing) so I was all for another game of animal antics – and this game doesn’t disappoint.

There’s shades of everything from Catan to Azul here. You can either Build (spend food tokens to buy stones from the Yak cart), Restock (take food from the cart, and add a stone to it) or head to Market (take food from the limited supply at market and a stone in a cart). There are lots of whimsical, delightful mechanics – the Yaks themselves have food preferences, so you can’t give the Vegetarian Yak meat or the Gluten-intolerant Yak bread – and the Baby Yak first-player token is a sly nod to the old “Youngest Play goes first” mechanic, but here it’s hairiest (shades of SAGA). Plus, yaks continually get lost in the fog, so the direction of travel around the board changes frequently, making it very difficult to game the system (though not making it too random either).

Scoring comes from building sets of colours, and being the first person to build a 4 layer tower. It’s surprisingly tactical but with chunky gaming pieces that keep it fun – you can’t not love trundling little wheeled yak carts around the board. We are absolutely smitten with it, it’s a joy to play, accessible, and easy to calculate final scores, always a bonus!