Known and liked
Phil Walker-Harding has many board games to his credit, and some have also appeared in the Polish language version. Among them, we can find several tile games – the much-liked Cocoa , the three-dimensional City of Clouds , the less known Gingerbread House or the Tetris Park of Bears . Lamaland borrows some mechanics from its predecessors and gives the player a new family game about grazing llamas.
We build and feed
As befits a family title, it has very simple rules. Preparation for the game consists in distributing starting tiles, coins, tokens of a selected color and three supports to each of them. We adjust the Llama cards to the number of players and arrange them in columns with the highest scores. We lecture five villagers and sort the Tetris tiles according to their shapes. We place resource tokens, llamas, and randomly drawn objective cards in a place that is accessible to everyone, and we can start the game.
On your turn, you must always choose one of the terrain tiles on top of the stacks. Then we decide how we will add it to our property. We can place it next to it so that it touches at least one side with the already existing areas or build it up and put it on the tiles you already have. In the second case, we need to cover the area on the same level, but we can also use supports to level the ground. We only have three of them, so you should use them carefully.
After selecting the first option, we can move one of our markers to the selected objective card. When performing the second possible action, we obtain the resources that we cover with the exact tile. If we cover the picture of the city, we can choose one of the displayed citizens’ cards, which will give us profits later in the game.
After adding a tile in one of two ways, we can feed one lama, i.e. take the highest scored animal card from one of the three columns. Each of them will always eat four resources – corn, potatoes or cocoa. Each missing token can be replaced with two coins. Then we take the llama figurine and place it on our clearing, on which there is no symbol. It will stay there until the end of the game, blocking the expansion of the property, but in return it will allow you to complete some of the objectives.
How was it in a land full of llamas?
Lamaland is a simple tile game that I associate the most with the Gingerbread Hut (building up and retrieving obscured symbols) and the Bear Park (Tetris tiles and also perks from covering icons). Despite the well-known mechanics, feeding the llamas was not boring. It’s a family title so there aren’t any complicated decisions to make, but that doesn’t mean they’re obvious. When choosing a tile, we have to think for a while. First you have to consider the location – will we add or go up? Then the shape is important, as it rarely helps in the perfect arrangement of our property and what symbols are on the tile. By arranging them in the right place, we prepare the ground for the next tile, which we will be able to cover more icons, and therefore download more resources. This planning is really fun.
Replayability is ensured by the objective cards that we have to pursue. They are selected randomly and may concern, for example, the number of coins you have or the arrangement of llamas on the meadows. Each card can contain up to three markers, but the later we decide to place it, the less points we get. This forces you to think about additional requirements when choosing tiles, which makes it difficult to arrange the areas optimally. Likewise, the lamas that are fed later, the less points they will bring, and the cost will be just as high.
Lamaland is a good family game that will stay with me and I will be happy to take it out at the next board games. Maybe it’s not very original, because while reading the description I saw references to many well-known tile titles, but the gameplay is so enjoyable that I don’t mind. In addition, cute llamas will attract younger players to the table, who will persuade their parents to play, and in such a group it is a very good position. It is also good for introducing beginners to new mechanics and categories of board games, which I always do with great pleasure.
