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In PARKS you take on the role of two hikers exploring different trails throughout the four seasons, collecting memories in the forms of different shaped tokens, taking photos, buying gear, and eventually turning in your memory tokens to visit one of the many United States National Parks.
Solo Gameplay Overview
In the solo variant of PARKS, the player will be hiking alongside a set of two park rangers, represented by a pair of hikers of your choosing.
The player will be moving down a trail to locations of their choosing collecting shaped tokens from the space they are on in order to collect enough to visit one of the three revealed park cards and collect it for its end-of-game value. The player will also have a year objective card that gives them bonus points for achieving it, these can be to do with the type of tokens used to visit parks, the amount of tokens used, or even gear they have purchased.
The Rangers movement is based on the gear deck, at the start of the game you do not set up the gear market slots as in a multiplayer game, instead on the ranger's turn you reveal the top card of the gear deck and the sun icon cost determines how many spaces they will move from one to three. You determine which ranger to move depending on whether the lead ranger is ahead or behind the player.
As the rangers move down the trail they will pick up any weather-based tokens on the spaces they land on, these will be placed on a ranger tracker card and will correspond to an event card from the solo/ranger deck. Every time they collect three of either the sun token or the water token they trigger the current event card, this will affect the player in some way, usually negatively impacting them.
The reaching the trail end works very similarly for the player while when a ranger reaches the end of the trail the space and action they take is determined by the gear cost of the card that got them to the end of the trail, eliminating certain parks and blocking end of trail spaces.
At the end of the game, you total the points on your parks, photos, and year objective cards and compare it to the score chart in the rule book which will give you a ranking based on how well you did. Allowing you to aim for a better score or rank the next time you play.
How it Plays
Overall the PARKS solo variant plays very well and emulates the multiplayer game while not feeling like a lesser version. The game has the same clear objectives and goals as the main game while also having enough variation in the parks and objectives deck that you aren’t always playing the same exact game each time.
The solo game manages to mostly keep the calm exploring feel that you will know from the main game and the theme is just as present as the main if not slightly more so with the idea of the park rangers, I made mine the green hikers to lean into the ranger theme. The solo game plays fairly quickly especially if you have played the main game before so you are only learning the solo side of things but even so, I don’t think this game would be hard to learn for a completely new person to the game.
The game is structured around some fairly basic and easy-to-lean mechanisms such as ratchet movement and set collecting and even presents them in a friendly way for newcomers but doesn’t get held back by the theme and the gameplay is so well integrated that unless you step back and really analyse what you are doing you don’t notice that it lacks the complexity of other games, which proves that you don’t need to over complicate a game to make it engaging both on a solo and multiplayer level.
However, I do have some small issues with the changes made with the solo mode versus the multiplayer game. The biggest one for me is the solo deck events, these add a potentially negative event that doesn’t exist in the main game, at no point in multiplayer can another player make you discard all of a certain type of token, or discard down to just four tokens. It feels like adding a level of difficulty and stress to the game that wasn’t needed in my opinion and takes away from the calm pretty game I had come to love, it makes me focus less on my objectives and more on whether me not going after the seasonal tokens is going to come back at me if the ranger manages to get there first.
Having the rangers remove weather tokens, parks from the market, and block spaces works well as a way to emulate the main game, the ranger events just add something slightly unneeded for a lot of players. I feel like you could play without it and have it more as an optional way to add more challenge to players not as part of the standard difficulty.
My other issue with the solo gameplay is the way the gear deck replaces the market, as you draw for the rangers you place the gear in a slot depending on its cost, which means the open market doesn't really exist, the gear gets switched out so often that I found myself ignoring it, especially alongside worrying about the rangers events. It changes at a rate that even a 5 player game would never really have so doesn’t emulate that from the multiplayer game very well. I feel like having a set of gear separate from the Ranger's move actions that refresh at the end of the season would be more beneficial.
Both of these issues can be sorted with some level of house rules if you find you are having the same issues as me but I would recommend trying it once or twice the normal way and deciding for yourself.
Components
If you have played the game before on a multiplayer game you know that the components and art for this game is on a very high level. They thought through everything in this box from the stained wood token pieces, to the game trays, to how the game fits in its box they made the components a priority for this game.
The park art is part of an art project called The Fifty-Nine Parks that commissioned many different artists to make posters and other art for each of the United States National Parks, so the art on those cards are arguably on a higher level than most games.
The only new components for the solo mode that you would not have used in multiplayer are the cards in the solo/ranger deck, which are on par with the other mini-cards in the box
But I’ve Never Visited An American National Park
This game is a great play whether or not you have visited any of the American National Parks. So long as you can understand the theme of hiking and like pretty art then you are fine. Yes, you might get a little extra joy seeing a park you have visited in real life come up but otherwise, this game uses the parks as part of the theme and not part of the mechanisms.
Final Thoughts
The solo mode for this game does a fairly good job of emulating the main game allowing the gameplay to feel like the same experience and not like you are playing a different game as with some solo modes. The game does try to add a new mechanism to add a new level of challenge for solo players, this new mechanism might work for you it might not and can easily be removed if it is taking away from your enjoyment of the game.
The game is gorgeous and relaxing a perfect game to play when you don’t feel like an overly challenging game but still want to feel like you accomplished something by the end.
I think PARKS is a great addition to someone's collection whether they just play solo or they also play multiplayer. The game is fairly simple to learn but with enough variety to allow each playthrough to bring variety to the game.
