Matthew BaileyGame 35# of the “Now & Then Summer Marathon 2024” is “Confusing Lands” played with Jack(9)
“Confusing Lands” is a small box, small deck tile-laying game fairly similar to a few other games I’ve reviewed recently, such as “Chomp” and “Namalia.”
The general concept of the game is to shuffle the deck, consisting of a very lean 18 cards, and place one in the middle showing a scoring condition.
Each card has 2 sides with either six squares on it or, alternatively, four squares plus a scoring condition. These scoring conditions are what you are going to try to score your points on during the game.
At the start, you put one scoring condition out into the middle; this will be the shared scoring condition. From that point, each player takes two cards with which to start making their land. Apart from the first card, whenever you lay a land card, it must overlap at least one square which is not a scoring condition on a previous card.
Each player lays whichever card they want out of the two, either laying the six-square side or adding another scoring condition to their land. This is a really unusual mechanic where you can rack up scoring conditions to try to get more points. The key thing is that each scoring condition gives you minus 10 points, so you need to be sure that the scoring condition you are laying is going to give you at least more than 10 points. Otherwise, it’s actually going to cost you, and it’s a really good risk-reward mechanic that I really enjoyed. It’s something that I haven’t seen too much in other games. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the concept in “Ticket to Ride,” where towards the end of the game, you try to work out if you’re going to take any more routes and if you’re going to be able to connect them. In this case, you know what you’re going to get; you can see the scoring condition in front of you, and it’s up to you to make that judgment as to whether it will score you points.
Jack and I played several games testing this out. In one, he ended up only using one scoring condition, while I chose about three. There’s definitely a lot of decision-making involved as to what the correct strategy is, which largely depends on the scoring conditions in front of you.
Some scoring conditions are a lot easier to achieve than others. Some of my personal favourites are the Great Prairie, where you get two points for your largest bit of green space, and the River one, where you get four points for every bit of river in your largest river. These are a lot easier to achieve than ones like getting a point for every river flowing into a mountain, which is a lot harder.
This is not a high-scoring game, and the best any of us did in any of our games was 31 points, which we were relatively pleased with.
“Confusing Lands” is actually a really enjoyable tile-laying game. There are a few things I’m not as keen on, one being that the cards themselves are a little bit shiny and definitely could have been less slippery when you try to overlay them. Equally, the artwork on the scoring conditions is not always the clearest. Jack and I found ourselves having to refer to the rulebook every time we got a new scoring condition because it wasn’t very clear what the iconography on the cards meant. However, this is a relatively small issue that didn’t overly spoil the game.
All in all, “Confusing Lands” is a decent small box game with a really interesting mechanic involving the decision of whether to stack scoring conditions. I am definitely going to pick up my own copy once I have sent this review copy back. It’s available on Zatu for under £10, which, to be honest, is pretty decent for this game.
Disclaimer: A copy of “Cosmic Chains” was provided by “Envy Born Games” via the “UKBG Review Circle.” Our thoughts and opinions are our own, and the price (which is great value) has been taken into account.
