MEEPLE LAND

Life is a meeple rollercoaster

Ithink I can say, without a doubt, that everyone has wanted their own theme park at one point in their lives. It could be a childhood fantasy, an actual career goal, or just a recurring dream that always makes you late for work. The desire is so prevalent that games have been trying to sate it for decades. From the ancient Theme Park World video game to Funfair, Trool Park, Imagineers, or Roller Coaster, designers have been trying their darndest to bring that joy to you. And while the Board Game Geek ratings for theme park games rise and fall like a rollercoaster, publisher Blue Orange has bravely stepped up to try their hand with Meeple Land.

Starting with a blank field you’ll take it in turns to buy rides, toilets, food stalls, and gift shops to build your park. Each ride and service has its own unique path layout on it which requires clever planning as dead-ends will cost you points at the end. At first this seemed like it would be easy to avoid but by the third round the challenge really ramped up as the tangle of paths grew exponentially with every fun house and dodgems that were fed to it. Coupled with the needs of certain rides to have gift shops, bathrooms, or

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ 1 Individual

plot boards

◗ 1 Parking lot board

◗ 4 Plot extension tiles

◗ 4 Extra park

entrances

◗ 101 Attraction/

service tiles

◗ 17 Bus tiles

◗ 124 Visitor meeples

◗ 1 Park tickets token

◗ 1 Round marker

◗ 52 Coins

◗ 4 player park

entrances

◗ 1 Scorecard

notebook food stalls adjacent to them, Meeple Land quickly becomes a deceptively strategic game.

At the end of each round, players choose a bus from the central parking board. Each bus has a different number of coloured meeples on it and each ride you have can take a certain number and colour of meeples (which sounds kind of suspect but let’s not get into that right now). Your Ferris wheel might be able to take two blue meeples and an extra yellow meeple if you have a toilet attached. If you have those meeples in your park at the end of the round, you get cash for them. And at the end of the game, you get one point for every blue and green in your park and two points for every pink and yellow, because we want to attract the right type of clientele, understand?

I’m being facetious of course. As much as I rail against the concept of premium visitors, it’s just a subtle way of driving competition between players. Rides that cater to pink and yellow meeples are inherently more valuable, but only if you can 2-4 10+ £40

secure those visitors at the end of the round. If not, you’ll have to turn to advertising to draw them in and while it can help bring those much needed meeples, you might find yourself leaving others at the gate.

Mechanically, Meeple Land is great. Competition is driven in subtle but clever ways without ever needing to descend into blocking or frustrating each other. Heck, if you’re playing with someone who simply can’t stand the passive aggressive nature of Eurogames, you could quite easily stay out of each other’s way without changing any rules and that’s really nice to see. Especially as the pieces are too nice to see flying through the air. Those colourful little meeples and vibrant ride cards are so nice to have all set out on the board but what really makes the game for me is the park entrance. Two marble-effect podiums with a meeple at the top holding the Meeple Land sign and while it’s a shame we don’t get to have our own park names, the quality is top notch across the board so I’ll let it slide.

Colourful, vibrant, deceptively strategic, suspiciously classist, Meeple Land is a great way to start the year.

❚ YES

While you don’t get to launch visitors off of unfinished coasters, you still get to build a theme park and that’s awesome.

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED: UNFAIR

60m

PLAY IT?

With a lot more of a focus on management and underhanded tactics, this thematic cousin has a wonderful sardonic humour that anyone who has seen behind the theme park curtain will appreciate.

your workers’ efforts, with diversity of activity being the best guarantee of success.

Ore is clearly a labour of love for designers Joe McClintock and Jason Lyle Steingisser, who worked on it for seven years. Similar to Lords of Waterdeep, it is easy to recommend as an introduction to the worker-placement genre, with a straightforward theme and no need felt to mix it up with other mechanisms. As such, it might feel like it’s arrived seven years too late for some gamers, maybe a bit behind the ‘Hotness’ curve. But its pitdigging mechanism, while somewhat sanitised (there’s no sense of danger to your workers’ health or safety as they tunnel deeper), offers enough of a twist to keep you engaged, and anyone with a soft spot for the genre is bound to dig it.

PLAY IT?

60-90m 2-5

❚ YES

A solid entry to the worker-placement genre, which offers an enjoyable gateway to anyone interested in delving into the much-loved mechanism. 12+ £50

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED LORDS OF WATERDEEP…

It’s more ‘dungeons’ than ‘dragons’, but Ore shares the workerplacement classic’s accessibility.