PARKS: Nightfall Review - with Zee Garcia

hey hey everybody z garcia here today i'm taking a look at the expansion to parks this is parks nightfall here is of course about visiting the national parks in a you are traversing various paths you're going on hikes you're collecting resources and then you're using those to visit the different parks it is a gorgeous game as you can see here and one that has a nice amount going on under the hood it's uh in many ways a subtle game a game in which you have to be careful how to do well but it is a very satisfying game so what is nightfall here well nightfall is going to add a couple of things it's going to add a deck of cards which are new parks parks that now bring the ones in here to completion as of right now every park in the u.s national parks is now featured combining these two it also gives you a new option basically which is you can pitch a tent you can you can camp for the night and that gives you access to new actions new abilities and it's going to uh basically just give you a little bit more to do now in this review of the expansion here i'm not going to be covering how to play this if you don't know how to play parts you can check out our review for that and so you know you'll find out if it's something for you if you are familiar with it though this is where you want to be you want to check out if this is something that perhaps is going to uh enhance the original play maybe you've played a lot of it you want to know if this is going to revive the core box for you then let's go ahead and dive in let's find that out and i'm gonna see you on the other side of the table overview for some final thoughts all right so let's go ahead and take a look at what comes in the expansion okay i've got the game here set up and everything standard is near the top here the board the uh path here with four players already set up for the year all of that is the same so what is new well we've got this board down here which is new and these tiles that will show up next to it three random ones are in play out of a few more okay with one specific one being used with five players so all of these are set out i'll show you a glimpse at those a little later on okay we've got new cards new parts here and these are going to round out the deck of parks already so you can just shuffle these in i will point out there's one new thing on these which is an action down here after the cost there is an action with a lightning symbol that means that after you've paid for this and put it in front of you you can then take this action in this case you can pay one of the trees take a photo okay uh you can take a park action after this one and this one you pay that and then you can take a wild this one you pay your two mountains your sunshine take two water after that okay so again you shuffle these into the deck you lay out three as normal you lay out these as normal all of that stuff so what's the other with the other stuff we're setting up here uh you've got four new critters by the way you can just add them in to the uh the ones you've already got no problem and then we are going to set up for the beginning of the year these tents right here you set them up starting from the back so looking at the end of the trail we put one there and we put one here one here one here i want to point out this is a game for four players would be for five i would have one more of these out there if we were playing with three or fewer then i would have to make sure that i flipped this over so there's one fewer spot right here you'll notice that yeah and i would also remove this tent right here and there would only be three but let's not worry about that right now let's say we're going four now another thing to be mindful of is the deck of year cards from the original game we're gonna remove that entirely and it'll be replaced by this one right here it sort of takes the place of that deck the main difference being well you can earn more of these throughout the game so there is that but also the original ones we'll take a look at one here such as this one says that you can you can do something to earn two points or you can do something a little bit harder and earn three points well the new ones don't have a cap they're sort of on a sliding scale so for example you can this one here says you're gonna earn one point for every two mountains that show up on any parks you have so you'll see these two side by side if i earn two mountains i get a point two mountains with this one is nothing right uh or at least two parks with mountains is nothing but then once i get four mountains that's gonna be two points if i get eight that's gonna be four points and so on okay these are not quite the same this is counting cards not mountains themselves but you understand what i'm saying so these are on a sliding scale you can just try to do as well as you can per card as opposed to did i hit it or not hit it that's all there is these are kind of all or nothing yeah so you'll remove the original ones you'll put these in play you'll do the same thing with these as you did with the other ones shuffle them up everybody gets two you put one back on the bottom in this case the one you're not keeping and then you are ready to go so what is all those all of this stuff doing well pretty straightforward actually on your turn when you take an action if it's one of the uh regular places that doesn't have a tent you do the same thing you normally would do you take anything if it's there you can take the action listed there right and then if somebody goes to one of the places that does have a tent they'll get that and then you have a choice you can either take the action of the tile or you can use this tent okay when you use the tent you're gonna send it down here to one of these places that does not have a tent yet if you go here you can give up your water to turn that into wild tokens you can do that up to three times over here a single mountain for five sunshine grab a canteen get some water and then these two spots are going to allow you to pay some sunshine and grab more of these that's how you can keep earning these so in this game these become more important you can get as many as you want to right again i'll remind you once you go there somebody else later on if they go to one of these they cannot go to the same one they have to take something else and then once this year is done or the season is done rather we go to the next one then you are going to make sure that all of these show the side that they need to show for the second season now let me show you here you'll see on the bottom corner right there on that side it shows a one a slash and a three in that case this guy right here shows a one a slash and a two so first season both of these are right second season this is gonna stay like this we're gonna flip this one over this one will say a two and a four right there right so second season flip this one over as well and that's what we're looking at for the second one now uh this one is sunshine you trade in this you can turn a tree into five water instead of that conversion and in this one you can clear off um let's see oh that one didn't flip but when it does flip eventually you can clear off all your canteens take that water into your supply and then you gain a water after that and that new one you could then put on an empty a newly empty canteen now besides those like i said we've also got a couple of other ones that are not in play right now but they could be this one here lets you take pictures and then on the other side same deal but with a different uh resource this one lets you trade in something and take a new one or over here on the side you can pay two sunshine wipe away all of these if you want to and then gain one one of those or possibly the top one okay so that's what these do and it's a new way to get what you need it's a roundabout sort of way to earn something when you're getting blocked out here you can go get more ways to score get new ways to earn tokens and of course on top of that let's not forget the influence of these new cards that are going to earn you something just from visiting that park so there it is that's how the new content in nightfall is going to work let's go ahead and go back up top let me tell you what i think of it i am a fan of nightfall this is a small package as you can see this is a little a little box especially compared to the size of the original one here and the biggest negative i can say about it is that unfortunately the contents in it don't fit in here unless you get rid of the gorgeous insert i'm not about to do that so i will have to keep this extra box even though i i'm of the mind that i like to sort of put everything in the core game when an expansion comes out i won't be able to do that for this one that's about my biggest negative which is not much of a negative is it so let's go ahead and break it down let me tell you what i think of it all uh i i think i'm again like i said i'm impressed with it i think it's wonderful let me um mention a couple of positives here that are obvious positives okay and then i'll get to the meat the the ones that i think are important to talk about theme yes it's wonderful the theme uh and what this adds folds right in the idea of it becomes nighttime you need to pitch a tent stay the night sure it's a stretch the whole thing was a stretch i'm collecting sunshine to then go visit a park whatever but it it works it isn't suddenly about something else the tense thing folds in well the aesthetics of course it's gorgeous it's more of that artwork i mean it looks stunning everything about it is beautiful the iconography is still very good and usable everything works on that front the other things i have a little bit more to say about so the replay value absolutely i mean this kicks up the replay value there are new things to do there are different ways to tackle that there are uh now more variability from a setup point of view which leads to more replayability leads to more um ways to achieve what you think you're going for right or what you would you know the plan you've set out for yourself so absolutely that's going to get a kick up game arc is especially interesting now because you now have new ways to get to the same place that's the main takeaway for me after i played this a couple times i was like man i keep finding myself with these points in the game where i am blocked from getting that one thing i need to really uh you know jump to the end and then cash in this park and then you know visit this park now i'm seeing these alternate paths to victory right i mean i might not win the whole game but um it's an alternate path to achieving what i was trying to go for oh i can jump here take a tent action go down there and then turn this into that and that's a way around what i was trying to do in the first place oh i could actually take and and visit this park and as an instant action that park gives me this other thing that then i can turn around and use in what i was hoping to do all of these new additions i think ultimately lead to more choices more paths to the same thing a winning strategy right the different parts here are all coherent for me everything in it makes sense and drives towards a singular purpose giving you more options and choices the ease of play does not suffer because of that the setup is you know the setup i mean the the with this adds on to the setup is smooth it's very straightforward maintenance from one round to the next very simple very low so i like that about it i like that you have a whole new option at some of the locations along the trail yet it's really easy to implement and add those things on lastly tactics strategy look i've already kind of talked about that it's all out there right this new stuff uh except for the new year cards and that that's a whole becomes a whole new thing that's probably the weakest thing from the original game right you would draw a couple of these at the beginning you'd keep one of those two right at the top of the game and then you were gonna at most get three points from that and you would sometimes try for that it kind of informed you a little bit but sometimes it was so hard to do and it felt uninteresting to to put all this effort into possibly getting three points possibly falling one short and not getting the three just getting two or maybe one short of the two points which gave you nothing at all right that's the biggest change i think and that is the most wonderful change those new cards you're gonna draw more of them throughout the game you're gonna have more hidden scoring i'm a big fan of the hidden scoring in the game because it's not every i know you're not quite sure who's winning at any given point moments right i like that a lot um the new parks with special abilities that trigger right away when you claim those fantastic tense actions are you know an escape valve a new way to get to something so yeah everything about this works for me i think it's a good rock solid addition you know to the original game and my rating is based of course in many ways from a point of view of an addition to this assuming you like this what i'm saying is if you hate this game no this is not going to change your mind it's more of that game you know um i like the original one quite a bit i rate this an 8 out of 10. this expansion i do think makes the game better i think those year cards especially make the game better okay so this is going to get a 9 out of 10 from me that means this expansion now in combination with the original game gets a seal of excellence nightfall is excellent they packed a lot of content into this skinny little box and there's a lot of interest here it really comes through the the beauty the passion the interest it all gets uh gets a kick up okay so there you go that is parks nightfall nine out of ten from me i'm z garcia i want to see you on the next one you

Channel: The Dice Tower

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Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, board game review, boardgame, uno, ticket to ride, apples to apples, educational games, educational, top 10, GeekUsername: zunyer

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Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 29 2020