One Play Review #1 - Reykholt

My first Rosenberg!

Reykholt is a worker placement game about farming vegetables. It is also a racing game... Putting those two themes together sounds completely bonkers, but damn if it isn't a smooth flowing, fun and tense experience.

In Reykholt each player gets three workers and, by placing one worker per turn, gets to choose an action. These are divided into 5 different sections: Get vegetables, Get greenhouses, Seed the vegetables in the greenhouses, Harvest some of the vegetables already seeded the greenhouses or do one of the special actions like obtaining a bonus card or discarding a vegetable/greenhouse to get something else.

The main objective of the game is to collect enough vegetables to advance onto the next space of the Tourist track - a set of tables each requiring a higher cost to progress, with the person who gets the furthest on the last round winning the game.

And that's pretty much all you need to know to play the game, it is a wonderfully simple and elegant game that was explained to us in about five minutes and we felt comfortable enough to get straight into it, even if it did take a few turns to properly click.

The first thing you will probably notice about Reykholt is that it is a looker of a game. The artwork is superb, the wooden resources are all beautifully designed and actually resemble the vegetables they represent instead of just being coloured cubes, and the game even comes with these nice boxes to put all the resources into. Of course, art is not the most important factor in a game, but I feel like here it really helps the theme come out better.

Mechanically it's also a pretty tight game with you having to think at least a move or two ahead to make sure you've got the vegetables needed to advance further on the track. My impression from the game we played is that there are also multiple paths to victory as one of our players focused on getting greenhouses and seeding to build himself an engine and get as many resources as possible, while I went for a completely different strategy and focused solely on advancing on the track. In the end I finished just one table behind that other player and even that was solely down to a mistake I made in the last turn.

However, my favourite mechanic in Reykholt by far, is that once per turn you are allowed to advance one table space without paying the resources and instead collecting the vegetables you would have paid from the stock pile. In the racing games I played, it is far too easy to end up with a runaway winner where there are still a few turns left, but the outcome is already obvious making it an incredibly demotivating experience for other players. Simply by introducing that one mechanic Reykholt seems to avoid that problem and, even as we were scoring the last turn, we were still unsure who would come out on top and ended the game within only a few spaces from one another.

As I've probably made quite obvious, I really enjoyed Reykholt, however I do have one concern which is preventing me from buying it for my collection straight away, and that is whether or not the game may become repetitive after a few more plays. I could definitely see people settling into the same, optimal strategies as they get more familiar with the game and the whole experience becoming less about planning ahead and more just going through same motions over and over again. I believe that should be somewhat mitigated by the different bonus cards, but that's only one of the many possible actions in the game (we only used it once), the rest of your options always stay the same and I don't think there's quite enough of them to make every game feel uniquely different. I'm sure some people will lynch me for just for thinking it, but I do believe this is a game that could really use some randomness in it, something to make people think on the fly and shake up the strategies.

I should also mention that the game comes with a Story Mode, which we obviously didn't get to try, but I imagine it would definitely add to the replayability of the game.

Reykholt was the first Uwe Rosenberg I've played and I definitely enjoyed my time with it. It flowed smoothly, the theme came through greatly and the game ended in a tight race to the finish. I'm still on the fence about buying it for myself, but it definitely got me interested in trying more games from the same designer.