Parks Solo Mode Review - with Mike DiLisio

hey there everybody it's Mike Lee CEO with another solo mode review today I'm gonna be taking a look at parks from designer Henry Audubon and publisher key master games in parks you are playing as a hiker visiting different national parks and in the solo game you're gonna be sharing some trail space with Park Rangers and so why don't we head on over to the table I'll give you a quick overview of how the game changes in the solo game any different components and rules changes and then we're gonna come back here and I'll give you my final thoughts on the solo mode so let's head on over to the table okay here we see a game of parks set up for the solo game as far as component changes there are just a couple the main things I want to highlight is that you are gonna start off as a color you're gonna have your normal two hikers in this case let's say I'm playing purple you're gonna choose another color for the Rangers who you're gonna be kind of sharing the park path with and in this case I went with the white tokens for them you're gonna start with the first player marker you're gonna start with the camera you're gonna start with your fire campfire kind of like normal you'd have that but these to start with you as well the main difference is is gonna be that you're gonna make sure that the trail end is gonna have the solo side and you'll see here at the bottom it says solo normally you would have this as your trail in solo game you make sure that it's set to the solo side the other thing you're gonna do is you're gonna have this deck of event cards and the Ranger tracker card which is actually part of that that's the only difference as far as components go in the solo game the correct side of the trail and this event deck and the ranger tracker card the last thing to cover is that normally you would have three gear cards out there on display in the solo game you do not you have the gear deck there but you do not seed the board with those first three and the reason why will be seen here in a moment alright so let's talk about the gameplay changes so for the player your gameplay doesn't really change at all you're gonna move to of the spots that you would like to on the first term because you have nobody blocking you if you had somebody blocking you either yourself or a ranger you'd have to flip over your campfire token pardon me just like normal and so let's say I went here and I took this ocean spot I took this Sun that's there and the two water that correspond to that spot all of that is just as per normal now what's gonna happen is the ranger is gonna take their turn so what you do is you flip over the top card of the gear deck and you look at the number of Suns in the upper right which is also the cost of the gear card normally as in this multiplayer game you're only going to be paying attention to that for the cost well in the solo game what you're gonna do is use that for movement that one cost cards are gonna go here the two cost card is gonna go here and the three cost cards are gonna go here and so in this case when both Rangers are at the trailhead it doesn't matter which one you move you're gonna move it that number of spaces so in this case three one two three well they're not gonna stop on the same place as you they'll go to the next one so the Ranger is gonna go there they're gonna take this water and they're gonna place it on their water tracker okay so this Ranger tracker card has as you can see here a spot for three sons and a spot for three waters as they collect the actually sorry this should have been seated here so you can see what event you're dealing with and in this case it was dense fog all right and so you place it next to it so that you can kind of see what's coming in this case if they fill up all three of their waters by collecting them from from the row here you're gonna have to discard all of the water that you have if you if they collect all three of the sons now the next event card is gonna be face down until it's activated so you don't know what bad thing is gonna happen normally like here you can see what's gonna happen when one of these triggers and you can maybe kind of account for it and mitigate for it in the dense fog case you cannot do so you just have to know something about is going to happen you'll continue to take your turns the Rangers will continue to their turns in this case will be a one so let's say I had moved here as long as one of the Rangers is ahead of yours then the one in the back is gonna go so in this case they would move forward one alright what changes when they get towards the end is let's say that I had moved here and now there's someone ahead of the Rangers so the front one is gonna go he's gonna flip over card it's a 1 he could go here let's say for example though that he had gotten another 3 I'm gonna try to find really quickly there we go let's say instead at this point he had pulled that three card now one two now he's going to the trail end and so what you're gonna do is you're gonna look at the spots here and depending on which card gets them to the trail and is gonna be where they go on these three spaces in this case it was a three so what he's gonna do he would go here he would remove the rightmost Park so this card would be gone now I would not have access to that it would not refill right away and then all of the three Sun cards would get shuffled back into the gear deck if a one Sun card gets a ranger to that spot they will remove the leftmost Park and then the Ranger will move over to here and so if you had not already gone there they would take the first player if you had already gone there they would block that Reserve Park spot you could not go there with your second one if you went the Ranger went there with the two Sun they would remove the second or the center as they say here the middle park card and then you would have to return the camera back to the supply so that's really how that happens those are the major rules differences is just that you use the gear cards for movement depending on which gear card gets them into the trail end you're gonna take the appropriate actions there the ranger tracker is gonna fill up and more and more events are gonna happen none of which are potentially things that you want move your back hiker to the closest ranger discard one of your gear move your back hiker to your front hiker discard down to four sources Rangers immediately move again discard all of your sons so you can get the idea here these are none of these are things that you want to happen they're all things that cause you to kind of get in the way of you fulfilling what you want to do at the end of the game you add up all of your points as normal and you're gonna get a ranking here based off of what it says in the book with with a matrix between less than 20 22 24 and 25 to 29 all right so there you go that's the difference in components and rules let's head back over and take a look at my final thoughts okay hopefully that gives you a pretty good idea on how the solo game of parks differs from the multiplayer game the small component changes and rules changes now I'd like to give you my overall impressions of the game first of all the solo experience there are three main things I like to look at when we talk about this and a solo game the first is win conditions does it have a clear win loss condition are you playing against an automated opponent or is it a beat your high score variant well parks unfortunately in my mind does go the score high score variant and normally this is something that causes me quite a bit of consternation some games are more suited for a virtual opponent than others and honestly in parks this is one of the rare occasions where the high score variant doesn't bother me too much and it's strictly because of thematic reasons parks is a game where it wouldn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense to be competitively trying to see more parks now in the regular game that's essentially what you're doing you're trying to visit more parks than the other players but there's not a real cutthroat feel to the game even in the multiplayer game the main thing is that you could potentially be blocking other players from going places that you might want to go you might be visiting parks that they may look may be looking to visit and so it would not have been completely out of the realm to have a solo opponent in the game where you are trying to do what you are in the multiplayer game that being said it doesn't bother me very much that in the solo game you are kind of sharing space along with the park rangers and you're really focusing more on trying to maximize your experience could they have done a solo opponent they certainly could and it may have actually led to a stronger solo experience but I'm cutting a little bit of a score based on this but not as much as I might have in another type of game setup and teardown is another thing I like to look at and in parks the setup and teardown is fine it's a relatively short game you're talking about less than an hour for the solo game and the setup is pretty quick I mean you especially once you've played the game a few times you can set it up in five minutes it's not a heavy time commitment to set this game but to take it off your shelf to get playing it you're playing it within a few minutes and so the setup and teardown is is great especially for a game of this weight this time period if if it was much longer of a setup it probably would have been a negative in this case it's perfectly fine rules are another thing I like to look at in a solo game and the rules for parks both multiplayer and solo are pretty clear the solo section is at the end they didn't try to integrate it into the main rule book I do appreciate that I think it can be really challenging when they kind of stick it all together and you have to parse out which is applicable for the solo game or not so a clear spot in the book for the solo rules and they are relatively clear the only thing that might cause a little bit of confusion is kind of when the end of trail actions take place the the Rangers how they handle their end of trail that can be a little bit confusing but I found it to be relatively intuitive I didn't have a tremendous amount of problems with it so overall I think the rules were a positive ok so overall what do I think of parks as a solo game I think it is relatively close to the multiplayer game in the level of charm that it exudes and that's the thing that I probably appreciate it about this game most is that the theme really comes through it's a game where you don't feel this pressure at all and and for some that might be a negative but for this game to me it's not your you're really trying to have a pleasant experience you're travelling along the trail you're collecting resources you're getting gear you're taking photos you're visiting parks you know you do have these events that come up in the solo game and those events can sometimes cause a little bit of tank attention a little bit of angst but generally speaking this is a game of enjoying the journey trying to get the most out of this journey and I think that the solo game captures that quite well I think that most of the things that I really like in the multiplayer game are still there in the solo game you still have all of the main mechanisms in play there's really very little difference other than you have just those Rangers that you are having to account for and those events that come up so the positives that I found in the main game the art the components the the mechanisms I really liked the moving forward on a track not being able to go back you can go as far as you want but you're passing up those other spots all of those things I still find charming in the solo game of parks I take off a little bit because you have the high score variant and that's never my preferred method of a solo game it's also relatively light there's not a whole lot of decisions to make but the ones that you do have to make are are satisfying and so with all of that being said I think of parks as a very good solo game above average and that's why I'm rating it a 7 out of 10 it's a game that I think has some legs probably not the game you're gonna come back to 30 40 times as a solo gamer but your mile your mileage may vary on that if you particularly like the theme it might be one that comes back more often than not all right well thank you very much for your time as always and have a great day [Music]

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 12,386

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

Id: 04-ZxR_GXFU

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2020