Parks

At the time of writing, we’re still in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Trips away and idyllic plans got put on pause. We’ve had to cancel holidays, and travelling to far-flung places is a case of fuhgeddaboudit. It’s fortunate then that Parks allows you to visit national parks around the US, from the comfort of your own home. If you’re not familiar with this game already, fear not. I’ll be explaining how to play Parks from set-up to conclusion.

The stunning art direction comes from the Fifty-Nine Parks team. Your two hikers trek the span of the United States of America. You’ll marvel at the charming wooden components that sit inside the classy Gametrayz insert. You’ll bask in the phenomenal visuals on the 48 Park cards up for grabs. You’ll nod your head in satisfaction at the class that oozes out of this title from Keymaster Games. While you might not be in said breathtaking locations, you’ll make memories of your own when playing Parks.

So double-knot your laces and fill up your canteen with water (or something stronger, we won’t judge). Leave the map at home. Let’s go for a wonderful, meandering hike along the trails within these areas of natural beauty. Join me as we learn how to play Parks!

How Do You Win?

Before we start, what’s the aim of Parks? It’s always wise to establish how to win a board game, when digesting the rules – or explaining them to others! Parks is a worker placement game for 1-5 players, with elements of set collection. The game lasts for four rounds – ‘Seasons’ – and during this time, you’ll aim to visit national parks. You’ll earn tokens, take photos, use hiking gear, and spend tokens to claim park cards. The player with the most points at the end of the fourth season wins the game.

Sigh With Happiness During Set-Up

Before I show you how to play Parks, I’ll explain how to set-up the game. Place the board in the middle of the table. The two Gametrayz can sit either side of the board, with the wooden tokens already inside them. No need for a messy table with overspilling pieces! Ahh, bliss. The Parks cards are the larger, Tarot-sized deck. Shuffle them and draw three face-up, at the top of the board. Allow your eyes to linger at their beauty for a moment, and then continue setting up the game!

Shuffle the Gear deck. Again, draw three cards from it and place them face-up beneath the Parks cards. There’s subtle iconography on the board, signalling where to place the Parks and Gear decks. (The right-hand side of the board.) Likewise, the Canteens deck and the Seasons deck sit on the left-hand side of the board.

Shuffle and then turn over the top card from the Seasons deck. Next, shuffle the Canteen cards and deal one to each player. Players keep this face-up in front of them. The final cards are the Year deck. Shuffle them and deal out two to every player. These are private objectives. Players pick one to keep and discard the other to the box.

Building This Season’s Trail

Next, create the Trail for the first Season itself. Separate the five Basic Sites (add the sixth if playing with 4-5 players) from the four Advanced Sites. Pick one of the Advanced Sites, blind, and add it to the Basic Sites. Shuffle them and then place them between the Trailhead and the Trail End. These Site Tiles are cardboard chevrons; they tesselate to form a row.

Each player gets a Campfire and two Hiker meeples of their colour. Their Hikers start on the Trailhead tile. Assign a starting player and give them the triangular First Hiker Marker. The player to the right of the First Hiker starts with the Camera. That’s set-up complete: now it’s time to start trekking! Let’s learn how to play Parks.

And Now For Something Completely British: What’s The Weather Like?

Remember that Season card you flipped over? Sat in its bottom-right corner is a weather forecast. This is a pattern combination of Sunshine and Water. Ignoring the first Trail Tile (and the Trailhead and Trail End), place one token per tile, left to right. Match and repeat the weather pattern according to the Season card. You should now have single tokens across five of the six Trail Tiles. (Or six of seven, if playing with higher player counts, as stated earlier.)

Also stated on the Season card is an effect that comes into play for this first season alone. It could be something such as gaining extra resources in particular circumstances. Or, some Park cards could come with token discounts if claimed this Season. But more about that later!

Relight My Fire; That Park Card Is My Only Desire

The player with the First Hiker Marker goes first. They move one of their Hikers to one of the Site Tiles of their choice. They get to take the action stated on the tile when they land there. Then the next player moves one of their Hikers to a vacant tile and performs the action there. No two Hikers can share the same tile – unless you spend your Campfire token. Flip it so the flames become extinguished! Now you can visit an occupied tile. You can’t repeat this trait until you channel your inner 1990s Take That, and ‘relight your fire’.

It’s important to note that your Hikers move left to right. You don’t have to move to the immediate next tile; you can skip one or many of them if you want. But if you do skip some, this means that Hiker cannot then turn back and visit tiles to the left (behind you) later on. Theme-wise, you’re hiking in one direction, from point A (the Trailhead) to point B (the Trail End).

Most of the Basic Sites provide you with tokens: 2x Sunshine, 2x Water, 1x Forest, or 1x Mountain. So, straight away, you know that Trees and Mountains are harder to acquire than Sunshine and Water. Take these tokens from the Gamestrayz. You can have a maximum of 12 at any one time. If you’re the first to land on Site Tiles with the free ‘weather’ token, claim it as a bonus.

Why do you want these tokens? Remember, you want to buy Park cards. Each of the three Park cards that you dealt during set-up states the number of tokens required to Visit it. They’re worth varying victory points. The more points they are worth, the tougher token requirements, or quantity. I’ll explain how you claim these cards later. But first… Let me take a selfie!

Swig Your Water And Take Memories With You

One Basic Site along the Trail doesn’t provide resources. Instead, it shows the Canteen icon and a photography icon. You can perform one of these actions. Pick the Canteen option and you draw the top Canteen card and place it face-up in front of you. See how there’s a Water silhouette on the flask? If you gained a Water token this turn, you can use it to fill up this Canteen. Place the token on the Canteen card – or an earlier-claimed Canteen. Now you can gain the action stated on that Canteen card. (Usually, it’s gain bonus resources.)

Instead, if you pick the photos option, you give in any two of your tokens to take a photo (worth 1VP). You also claim the Camera from whoever had it last. If you already had the Camera, snap! The Camera owner only has to pay a mere single token to take a pic.

What’s The Deal With Those Advanced Site Tiles?

Advanced Site Tiles offer different actions. Of course, only one of these will be in your game right now, for this first Season. (Spoiler alert: the others will enter the game later! But more about that further down.) The four Advanced Site Tiles offer the following actions when you land on them:

• Give up any regular token in exchange for a Wildlife token. (The hint is in the name; they’re wild! As in, they can stand for any token type.)
• Give up any regular token and exchange it for a different regular token type of your choice. You can do this twice.
• Either: a) Reserve/Visit a Park card, or b) Buy one of the three face-up Gear cards.
• Give up a Water token to mirror the action of any other Site Tile. Provided, that is, there’s another Hiker present there.

Reaching The Trail’s End

At some point, you’ll either run out of Trail, or you’ll opt to move one of your Hikers to the Trail End. When you move here, you’re presented with a few options, and you can perform any one of them. You could decide to Reserve a Park. To do this, you place your Hiker in the top space on the Trail End. If you’re the first player to place in this option this season, you also claim the First Hiker Token for next Season. Later players can also Reserve Park cards too, but not with an extra benefit.

Reserving a Park means taking one of the three face-up Park cards and place it in front of you. (Or you can gamble and Reserve the top card of the deck, blind.) Reserving is different to Visiting a Park. Reserving is taking a Park card that you plan to fulfil later – like you would in, say, Splendor.

The second option is buying a Gear card instead. Remember you dealt three out during set-up? Gear cards provide game-long benefits in Parks, or provide immediate rewards. They might be permanent discounts off Visiting Park cards. Or they might be means to fill your Canteens at certain points. There are 36 of them, so plenty of variety! Gear cards cost a range of Sunshine tokens. Are you the first player to place in this option this season? You gain one Sunshine token (so a -1 discount, if you like). Later players can also buy Gear cards, but don’t get the Sunshine token benefit.

The final option is to Visit a Park. This means paying the specific tokens to claim a Park card for its points. This can either be from the three face-up Park cards or one you might have Reserved, earlier. If a Park gets Reserved or Visited from the board, replace it with another from the deck.

Enjoy Your Hike, By All Means… But Don’t Dawdle!

You have two Hikers, remember. Once your first hiker reaches the Trail End, you get to flip your Campfire token alight again. (So once again, if you want, you can visit an occupied tile). When it comes to moving your Hikers, you can move one on one turn, and the other on a later turn. Or, you could move one again and again – the choice is yours. Once both of your Hikers reach the Trail End, you’re done for the Season.

On the flip-side, you might not want to dawdle too long, though. Once there’s only one Hiker left on the Trail, they have to join the rest on the Trail End and pick an action. (So they miss out on any further Site Tile actions.) Some players might rush to the end, to prevent other players from hoovering up multiple actions en-route to the Trail End. After this, the player with Camera gets another opportunity to take a photo (costing any one token). Then it’s time to start a new Season…

Prepping For The Next Season Is A Breeze

There’s a little bit of next-round prep. Remove any Water tokens from Canteens and return them to the supply. All Hikers return back to the Trailhead. Pick up all the Site Tiles – discard any bonus tokens on them, if any. Add in another Advanced Site Tile. Shuffle them, and then place them out to create a new trail order for the new Season. It will be one tile longer than the previous Season.

Return the Season card to the bottom of that deck and reveal a new one. This will state a new weather pattern. Once again, skip the first Site Tile, but obey the Weather Pattern for the remaining tiles. Also, note the new Season-long benefit/trait as stated on this Season card. The First Hiking Marker denotes the first player, who moves one of their Hikers. And the game continues…

Park Life

Now you know how to play Parks, but how do you win? At the end of the fourth season, it’s time for final scoring. You score the points shown on any Park cards you Visited. Bad luck if you didn’t Visit any Reserved Park cards – they don’t score. It’s no good Reserving all the expensive Park cards – at some point, you have to Visit (pay for) them!

Players earn 1VP per photo they snapped. Whoever has the First Hiker Marker scores 1VP. Also, reveal your Year card and see if you achieved your personal goal on it. They’re worth between 2-3VP, depending on how well you did. The player with the most points wins! If there’s a tie, then the player who Visited the most Parks wins. Although having spent time feasting your eyes on the wonderful artwork, everyone’s a winner having played a game of Parks!

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.

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.

SCORES:

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