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Reef
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Description
Reef is a game from Next Move Games, a game studio founded to bring out accessible games that all seemingly are named four letter words, albeit socially acceptable ones. The first of these was the phenomenally successful Azul. Can Reef prove even more popular?
On the face of it Reef is a simple game, on your turn you will either play a card from your hand or draw a card from a selection of four available. Each card you play will allow you to add two coral pieces to your reef, shown on the top half, and maybe score your reef, shown on the bottom half. The coral pieces are chunky plastic in four different colours and stack pleasingly on each other. Each tower can be up to four coral high and you are free to mix colours as you wish. You must remember two key rules, however, firstly only the top most colour counts for scoring, and secondly you can never remove any coral from your reef.
Why is this important? Because the second thing you can do when you play a card is to score the pattern on the bottom half. This will dictate how coral should be arranged and at what height to varying degrees of complexity. You can score each pattern multiple times if you plan wisely, but often you may have to not score a card at all, in order to plan for a future turn.
This creates a neat tension between grabbing cards that give you coral to build towards bigger scores, and potentially wasting the scoring potential of those cards, and trying to choose cards that will score every time you play them.
Of course, added to this is the fact that everyone else is trying to do the same thing, and may want the same card or cards that you do. Or perhaps they are just aiming for a massive payoff and you are need to stop them!
The cleverness of the scoring makes the game a lot more brain burning than the pretty components seem, meaning this is a great game for new and experienced players alike. It's easier to explain than Azul, yet perhaps with a touch more depth.
Similar to Azul this is a very pretty abstract game, but I’d argue that Reef attempts to embrace its admittedly light theme a touch more than Azul does. They both look great though, and help the promote abstract games as more than dry, boring, head to heads that last hours.
Player Count: 2-4
Time: 35-45 Minutes
Age: 8+
Reef is the next game coming from the publishers of the extremely popular Azul. The two games share the same publisher, and the same four letter name that is rumoured to be the theme for a line of family weight abstract games from Next Move Games, an imprint of Plan B Games.
The games also share a great attention to component quality. Whilst Azul had a very classy look, Reef has gone the route of bold and colourful, creating a different but still very appealing aesthetic on the table.
That’s really where the similarities end. Reef is an abstract game that stands on its own as a family weight 2-4 player game. The colours might fool you into thinking the game is aimed at children, but there’s actually a really neat card drafting, puzzly, three-dimensional game in Reef that we believe rivals its award winning predecessor. Let’s take a closer look!
Reef Gameplay
Each player starts the game with a 4×4 grid player board, with four pieces of coral on it, one of each of the four colours. Players will then take turns doing one of two actions: either taking a card or playing a card. This repeats until either one of the piles of coral runs out or the cards run out, at which point the player with the most points wins. When you take a card, you may take any of the three cards in the display for free, or take the card on top of the deck at the cost of placing one of your victory points onto one of the cards on the display.
Playing a card consists of two phases: First, you gain two new pieces of coral as drawn on the top half of the card. There are very few placement restrictions; you can put your new coral wherever you like, even on top of other coral pieces, but each stack can only go up to four high. After placing your new coral you get to score points according to the rules on the bottom half of the card.
Typically, you will be looking to get patterns of certain colours or certain heights, for example you might score three points for having two orange corals next to each other at least two high. When you evaluate your points you look from a birds eye view, so only the top piece of coral in each stack counts. You score as many times as the pattern occurs so forward planning can result in bumper rewards!
The game ends when one colour of coral runs out and the layer with the most accumulated points wins.
Reef Board Game Layout (Credit: EchoOperative BGG)
Amy’s Final Thoughts
Reef is very much a game about efficiency, every card you play gives you two coral and then scores you based on what you have present, but almost none of the cards give you the type of coral you need for the card’s scoring rule, so you have to try and combo your cards. In an ideal world you’ll manage to string them together so that each card sets up the next, but in reality you often have to play several cards to set up your next big score. It feels so satisfying when things go right, and equally frustrating when the cards you want just aren’t appearing.
It’s hard not to directly compare Reef to Azul. Both are easy for gateway gamers to pick up, both are absolutely stunningly gorgeous, and both play fantastically. Where I feel Reef falls behind a little bit is in the luck, sometimes a deck of cards just doesn’t like you and for an abstract game that can feel pretty harsh.
However, where it wins is play speed and simplicity, anyone can pick up Reef and understand it, and with each player having one fast action a turn you often find it’s your turn again already by the time you have collected your point tokens from last round! This is further reinforced by the gameplay encouraging thinking two or three moves ahead – at any one time you know what you are going to do to create the best combo over the next few turns. Unless a fantastic card appears you really have no excuse for slowing the game down!
In summary; Reef is beautiful, fun and easy to pick up. You may not like the luck of card drawing in an abstract game, and it may be a little simplistic for heavier gamers. But for a fast, light gateway game there’s a lot to love. Personally, I think Azul still wins the ‘abstract wars’ for the time being, but Reef is well worth picking up!
Reef Board Game – Player Board and Tokens (Credit: EchoOperative BGG)
Fiona’s Final Thoughts
I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t enjoy stacking their components and I love lots of games that make a game out of this joyful past-time. Reef really feels like an innovative design, using stacking and pattern building to give the feel of a tile laying game with hand management that almost edges into the realms of a very flexible and ever-changing engine builder. The mechanisms weave and flow together so well that the game feels fast paced, even though some decisions are very thoughtful and forward planning is paramount.
Even the end game in Reef is well thought out, and has particular appeal for more experienced gamers. The game ends immediately when one colour of coral runs out, but this doesn’t have the same deflating feeling as many games with a sudden end game trigger. Firstly, you can see it coming, but secondly, the left over cards in your hand trigger one scoring each. If you see that the end game is fast approaching, you can use your last two or three turns to deliberately avoid taking more coral in the colour that is low, and instead stockpile some cards that could give you a 15-20 point end game boost if you’re really successful.
To circle back to the comparison between Azul and Reef. Although they are very different games, they do fill a similar category for me in terms of family weight games that I could teach to almost anyone, but have something extra going on to stretch new players and keep seasoned gamers satisfied too. For me, Reef is the easier teach, but I think new players, like my parents, who frequently play Azul, would find it more challenging to do well in initial games because forward planning is so critical. I think the aesthetic is also key in terms of the success of the two games. Azul just looks like a classic that will be around for a very long time, whilst Reef, although super appealing, does have a more toy-like quality.
Personally, I think Reef might have the edge for me. It’s slightly less cut-throat than Azul, especially at the two-player count we frequently play at. It also scratches a bit of an engine-building itch, although it’s not strictly in that style of game. Reef looks great and plays really smoothly, and is really rewarding when you execute a brilliant sequence of turns. It’s certainly a game that I highly recommend.
Fiona and Amy can also be found at the Game Shelf with weekly reviews from a couple’s perspective.
Made by Next Move Games – the same people who make Azul – Reef is a clever tile placement game that feels simple on paper but quickly gets trickier than you’d expect. Much like the much-loved Azul.
However, while Azul is played in two dimensions, Reef is played in three, as you place and stack your lovely, weighty, colourful tiles to build a coral reef to get maximum points.
And in fact, beyond the substantially weighty tile pieces and nice, crisp design – the two games don’t really have that much in common.
How it works
Essentially each player takes it in turn to either draw or play a card. The cards – which can be drawn blind or from a choice of three face-up options – come with the promises of resources (two colourful reef tiles) and the potential to score points if the patterns on your board match the patterns on the card.
If you draw a card, you take it in your hand, ready to play it when the time is right. When you play a card, you acquire and place your two pieces of coral, then collect any points for matches between the pattern the card demands and the way the coral is set out on the map. Sometimes you might play for both points and resources – other times just for one or the other.
Building up
In Reef you’re encouraged to stack and build towers of up to four pieces of coral – and as you build towers, you can shift between colours – meaning that each decision you make can later be switched as you strive to make patterns to score points.
Essentially the scoring rewards either big towers of stuff, or blocks of similar tiles all together.
This allows for your tactics to adapt and flow as the game progresses and you adapt to the cards that are drawn – and you can win big points for a square of yellow coral pieces, then start covering them up to achieve a nice diagonal of reds.
It also allows for different players to build their score with different tactics. One player may opt for building high and scoring with simple patterns atop a nice big stack of tiles, while another may build low and score for more complex to achieve patterns closer to ground (or should that be sea-bed?) level.
Steady scoring
The gradual way you build your reef means the initial few turns become about gathering cards (to a maximum of four cards per hand) and often playing them just to start building your reef, rather than gather points. But, over time, as your reef becomes more stacked the points can amass quite quickly.
So the first few rounds you may find yourself barely scoring at all, while, as the game reaches its climax, you can find yourself raking in nice stacks of points to reward your more ambitious designs.
The game crashes to a halt when the first stock of one piece of coral runs out – which can be deeply frustrating. But smart players can stockpile cards in their hands and patterns on their map and then score the cards remaining in their hand. This can make for a slightly drawn-out resolution, but rewards those players able to think longer-term and meet several demands at once – and also means there’s little motivation for the winning player to try and bring the game to a premature end, as they never truly know what final scores their opponent may have up their sleeve.
More of a mechanism than a theme
While the game is supposedly about building a coral reef, in truth, the theme is barely there, and feels like a bit of an afterthought to a well thought about mechanic and game. You could just as easily be stacking counters, building buildings or planting a garden.
So Reef never really takes you away into an escapist world of tropical beaches and colourful fish – and doesn’t try to tell you anything about the importance of reefs to their ecosystems.
Nope, this game is all about the pleasing puzzle of building up your board, balancing pooling resources with taking points and being open to adapting, scrapping and changing tact as the game moves along.
And that thinness of theme would be an issue were the gameplay not so compelling and the physical stacking of quality pieces not so satisfying. In fact, you barely notice how little there is ‘behind’ the game – and get lost in the game itself. Which, in an odd way, feels like a win in itself.
Zatu Score
You might like
- Extremely visually appealing.
- Very easy to teach.
- Great puzzly elements.
Might not like
- The ability to plan ahead is required to do well.
- There is minimal player interaction.