PARKS

Category: Track Movement

Designer: Henry Audobon

Publisher: Keymaster Games

Year Published: 2019

Players: 1-5

Playing Time: 30-60 minutes

To Play or Not To Play: Play

PARKS is a cozy, well-produced game about hiking along trails and visiting the many beautiful U.S. National Parks. It's a relatively simple game buoyed by glorious production values and truly outstanding art.

A 4-player game about to start Season 4.

The game is divided into four "Seasons." Each player has two hikers that start the season at the beginning of a track of tiles laid out in a random order. On your turn, you can move either of your hikers as many spaces along the track as you like. Each space has some sort of effect, usually one that lets you gain one or two resources to add to your supply.

You cannot move backwards along the trail, but you can pick whichever hiker you want to move. You can leave one at the start to follow behind after your first reaches the end, or you can juggle both on the trail at once. The catch is, hikers cannot land on spaces that already have hiker on it, even if it's your own hiker . . . unless you set up camp. Each player has a campfire token, and you can use your campfire once to allow your hiker to land on a space that already has a hiker on it. Your campfire relights each time one of your hikers reaches the end of the trail, so you generally get to use it twice per season.

Each Season also has a couple of passive effects. They can allow you to gain a bonus resource after gaining a certain type of resource or reduce the cost of certain cards, and they will also designate a weather pattern that will place sun and water resource tokens in a specific pattern along the trail. Landing on a space with that token lets you take that resource in addition to what the space would normally give you.

Once your hiker gets to the end of the trail, you have a few options. The first is to have your hiker reserve a national park card, which adds it to your hand. The primary way to score victory points in this game is by visiting national parks, so reserving one allows you to ensure that none of your opponents will get to visit that park. The second option is to send your hiker to the shop to buy some equipment, like a water bottle, a tent, or a park pass. Equipment costs between one and three suns, and it grants you some sort of passive bonus for the rest of the game.

A close-up of the board, which holds the Parks, equipment cards, canteen deck, and current season card.

But the most important option is to send your hiker to visit a park. There will always be three face-up Parks on the display board, each of which ranges from 2 to 5 victory points and costs anywhere from 2 to 7 resources. To visit a park, you simply discard the matching resources from your supply, and then add the card to your score pile. I guess you can think of it as declaring which park you visited after the fact? The theme breaks down a little at this stage.

And that's 80% of the game right there. There are some extra tidbits: one space lets you spend a couple resources to grab the camera, which lets you take photos at certain times. Each photo is worth 1 point at the end of the game. You also start the game with a hidden goal, which can score a few extra points at the end. And you start with a canteen, which you can fill with a water resource to gain a small benefit (usually a different resource).

But the fun extra twist is that there are four special trail tiles, and you randomly add one to the trail each season. But you never remove any tiles, so the trail will get longer and longer as the game goes on. The first season will end very quickly, and many players may struggle to visit more than one park with their two hikers. But by the last round, players will have plenty of time to vacuum up resources and visit the most valuable parks.

Ultimately, this is a game about plotting out your hikers' paths along the trail, puzzling out how to get the resources you need to visit the most valuable parks, and accumulating as many points as you can. One thing to note is that the trail length doesn't change much with more players. The 2-3 player experience is very cozy game with just a smidge of blocking. With 4 or 5 players, you only add one extra tile to the trail, so it can feel mighty crowded and final scores will be significantly lower as a result.

But where this game truly excels is in the production design. Each of the resource tokens is loving sculpted from wood, giving them a rough, natural texture combined with a bright and colorful appearance. The cards all have beautiful art from the 59 Parks series, and the tiles have been lovingly designed to emulate that aesthetic. As an added bonus, the special "wildlife" resources each have a unique animal shape.

The designers also partnered with Gametrayz, which resulted in these two fantastic storage trays shaped like logs.

This is one of the most beautiful and effective inserts for any game I have ever played!

The game's insert is fantastic, and fits every component perfectly. This game box has no wasted space, and it is easy to store and transport. It takes a surprising amount of table space to play, as you need space for the board, the trail, each player's pile of visited parks, and at least one of those log trays. But for its size, PARKS punches far above its weight. It's a fun game, and while it's a little simplistic, it's still worth playing.

But wait! There's more! This game has been out for a while now, so let's talk Expansions!

PARKS: Nightfall

PARKS: Nightfall expansion

Released in 2021, PARKS: Nightfall revises some parts of the base game and adds a handful of exciting new features that push the game from good to great!

To start with, Nightfall completely replaces the original hidden goal cards with a brand new set that are more varied and more exciting. Where the original cards gave you bonus points for doing the things that would already win you the game, the expansion has cards that can encourage a change in strategy and open new avenues for victory, such as added bonuses for photographs, equipment, or leftover resources.

Another major addition are a set of additional Park cards to shuffle into the existing deck. These new parks have fun "upon visit" effects. For example, after visiting one of these new parks, you may get to immediately add an animal token to your supply as a sort of rebate. Or the park might give you the camera for free. Some even allow you to immediately visit a second park, if you can afford it!

But the biggest addition to the game are the new campsites. At the start of the game, 3 (or 4 in a 4-5 player game) campsite tokens will be placed on 3 or 4 tiles near the end of the trail. When a player lands on that tile, they can choose to either get the effect of that tile, or they can take the campsite token and visit one of 3 (or 4) campsites that were randomly selected from a pool of 6 at the start of the game. The campsites are all double-sided, with one side visible during two seasons and the other side visible on the other. The campsites have different patterns, though, so some flip every season, while others only flip once or twice per game.

These campsites have unique yet powerful abilities, such as the ability to take multiple photos, trade a rare resource for many common ones, or harvest water resources from your canteen so that it can be refilled and trigger its bonus again. Or, if you want, you can use a campsite to draw a new hidden goal card to add to your supply in case the one you have is not working out.

All of these new mechanics improve the core PARKS experience, but there is one major problem. PARKS had a perfectly sized box with a perfect insert. PARKS: Nightfall adds a bunch of new tokens, tiles, and cards. These components do not fit in the core PARKS box. PARKS: Nightfall also has a perfectly sized box with a fantastic insert the perfectly fits every component in the expansion. But what this means is that in order to store the game, you either have to ditch the lovely inserts or you have to carry both boxes separately. It's annoying because this is one game where I have no desire to play the base game with Nightfall ever again. The campsites don't add that much complexity, and the revised goal cards are far superior.

That said, the whole conceit of my reviews is whether or not you should play a game, not whether or not you should buy it. Whoever owns the game gets to figure out how to store and transport it. All I'm saying here is that you should definitely play the Nightfall expansion if it's an option.

PARKS: Wildlife

PARKS: Wildlife expansion

PARKS: Wildlife is the second expansion to PARKS, and it doesn't actually introduce many changes to the core game. Wildlife is a "More" expansion: more parks, more canteens, more objectives, more seasons, but very few new mechanics. This is another expansion that you'd probably shuffle into the core game and never remove if it all fit. If you have PARKS and Nightfall, you can squeeze Wildlife in too. But if you just have base PARKS, you'll have a hard time fitting in Wildlife as well.

The big new addition is Bob the Bison. He wanders through the display of parks, and if you visit the park that he's at, you can turn a basic resource token into an Animal. Neat! He moves from left-to-right through the parks, and then cycles around to the left. Every time he cycles, the active player gets to discard one of the equipment cards from the supply and replace it. This is a pretty nice effect that lets you keep the equipment cards from getting stale, while also incentivizing players to visit less-valuable parks.

Aside from that, Wildlife adds a few quality of life improvements to the rules, many of which could be used in the base game if you so choose. The first is whenever you draw a new canteen, you get to draw two and pick one. This is a nice little way to prevent yourself from getting stuck with multiples of the same canteen. And the second is instead of shuffling the four special trail tiles and randomly adding one to the path each season, you always include the "vist a park / purchase an equipment card" trail stop in the first season, and then randomly include one of the others in the later rounds. Wildlife also adds a few new special trail tiles to shuffle in with the other three. Frankly, all of the minor rules changes are great, and the new elements are a lot of fun. Wildlife is a good expansion. I wouldn't call it essential, but it is a fun addition.

So, to summarize:

PARKS base game: Play

Parks: Nightfall: Definitely play

Parks: Wildlife: Play

Not bad! A good game with one good and one excellent expansion. You love to see it! Alright, that should just about wrap up this post . . . what's that?

PARKS: Second Edition

PARKS: 2nd Edition?!

Category: Track Movement

Designer: Henry Audobon

Publisher: Keymaster Games

Year Published: 2025

Players: 1-5

Playing Time: 30-60 minutes

To Play or Not To Play: Play?

What the heck . . . that's never happened before!

Okay, you've probably noticed that it's been a long time since I last posted a review. There's been a bunch of reasons for that, and I'm trying to get back on track. I've had this PARKS review saved as a draft for months and months now until I could find some time to polish it and get it published.

Well, in that intervening time, Keymaster went and published a 2nd Edition of the game! Gah!

I haven't played this new version at all, so please take my thoughts here with a grain of salt as they are just based on the photos I've seen online and the press release.

So, what's different? Mechanically, very little. The biggest difference seems to be that instead of a gradually lengthening trail each round, the trail stays the same length every round. And instead of four seasons, you only play three. I think this roughly works out to the same number of movements per game. Also, the 2nd Edition incorporates the campsite and Bison additions from the Nightfall and Wildlife expansions. That's actually pretty nice: now everything will actually fit in one box! The game also changes how photos work. Instead of 1 point per photo, it's now just about who has the most photos. The snap-happy shutterbug with the most photos gets 4 points, and the 2nd most gets 2. This is probably for the best, it was easy to over-focus on photos in the base game and lose.

No, the big changes are all related to production and art design. The most obvious is the art, which is completely different. From what I've seen online, Keymaster lost the license to use the 59 Parks Series of prints. To keep the game in production, they had to commission new art. The art style on the new park cards is fine, but lacks some of the charm of the original. These things happen though, so I don't begrudge the change. No, what bothers me more is the graphic design of the rest of the components.

The original game had a lot of different small card decks, and this version of the game reformats them as cardboard tokens. Instead of canteen cards, you just get a canteen token that depicts the resource or effect you get when you fill the canteen. Campsite cards are now small double-sided tokens. And the trail itself is no longer a series of randomized tiles. Rather the trail is printed on the board, and you randomly place effect tokens on each space to change up the order.

Nearly all of the symbols and graphics have been redesigned to be simpler and less interesting. From the resource tokens to the campfire tokens, everything just looks cheap and simple.

And in a really surprising change, this game now gives everyone a player board to store canteen tokens, equipment cards, and resource tokens. It's nice, but I don't think think it's terribly necessary. Then again, maybe the canteen tokens would get kind of lost without something to keep them organized.

So . . . should you play this game? Well, it's still basically the same, and it incorporates the two expansions that I already said were worth playing, so yeah. By all means, play this game. I may be a bit disappointed by the art, and the changes from cards to tokens seem a little forced, but ultimately this is still a solid game that deserves your time. You should play PARKS, whether it's the original or the 2nd edition.

Thanks for reading, and I'm so sorry for the extensive absence! Now that I've graduated from my masters program, I hope to have these out more regularly. Thanks for reading! You can follow me on Instagram @toplayornot or on Mastodon @chriskizer@kind.social for announcements about new posts, updates on boardgame-related activities, and more!