Matthew BaileyGame 44 of the “Bailey Family Summer 2023 Board Game Bonanza” is “Beacon Patrol,” played by Jack (.8.), Toby (5), and myself.
“Beacon Patrol” is a cooperative tile-laying puzzle game that has been released in the last week or so, but I know some people picked it up at UKBGE.
The concept of the game is fairly simple: you shuffle all the tiles, starting with the main beacon which has water on all four sides. Each player receives three tiles, three movement tokens, a cute boat meeple that starts at the starting beacon tile.
On your turn, you can do a number of different actions. Firstly, you want to lay tiles, and ideally, on your turn, you want to lay all of your tiles, as any that are not laid are discarded. You can only lay a tile orthogonally next to where your ship is, and when you lay a tile, if possible, you must move onto that tile. If you find yourself in a dead end, you can also use one of your three tokens to move your ship without laying a tile, allowing you to get back into a position where you can continue. You are limited with this, however; you can only do this two or three times, depending on the number of players. You can also trade a token with another player asking for help and as its Coop even with very young kids you can therefore help them with their turn.
Another nice addition is that tiles all have to be facing the same orientation and cannot be rotated like in Carcassonne. This does however makes it much harder.
The general idea and concept of the game is that you are trying to discover and map out the sea, and you only score points for tiles that have another tile on all four sides. Tiles with a lighthouse earn you three points, tiles with a buoy give you two, and any other tile gives you one.
The game also comes with a Mini Windmill expansion which adds some other scoring opportunities, which are a nice little addition.
This game is one of those games that is really simple to teach. Both boys understood the concept immediately, but actually achieving a good score by intelligently laying their tiles and navigating in a way that maximises your tile placement is really difficult. If you look at the photos of the game that I recorded below, you can see that my boat on the right kind of took it upon itself to try and make something square-like, whereas the boys, who struggled a little bit more with the tactics and strategy, ended up creating a more haphazard layout. I’m also pretty sure that Toby moved a bit more than he was supposed to, but it was cooperative, so. In the end, on our best playthrough, we only scored 21 points, which still puts us in the novice category. So yes, this game is pretty challenging, even though the actual gameplay is quite straightforward.
The general build quality is good; the artwork is simple but charming, the tiles are well-made and have a nice weight to them, the boat tokens are cute and work well, and it all comes in a reasonably small box. There is an insert in the box, but it isn’t very well designed, and it could have been better. Essentially, the box needed to be slightly thicker so that the tiles could be stacked better. As it is, you end up having to lay them down in little piles and kind of shove them in. It also commits one of my cardinal sins in box design: it lacks horizontal and vertical writing on the sides to allow people to put the title how they like it based on their display preference.
Now, before I give my verdict, I just want to note that I really like tile-laying games, and my general reviews of any tile-laying games are probably going to be slightly influenced by the fact that I really love the genre.
I absolutely adored playing this game. It’s simple yet really tricky to do well at, and it’s different enough from any other tile-laying game I’ve played before that it definitely has a place in the collection of tile-laying fans. With titles like “Mists over Carcassonne” and “Dorf Romantik” released in the last year, the cooperative tile-laying genre is thriving right now. Have included my reviews of those 2 below.
You can pick this up for about £20, making it an excellent value proposition.
In fact (and I am just typing this sentence now having written and edited everything else) I am going to have another solo game on my own before bed to try and better my score.)
Excellent stuff can’t recommend this enough. (sorry)
