Matthew BaileyI’ve been recommended Dreadful Meadows a couple of times since it first came out back in 2023, and finally, what with the Halloween season, I thought it was worth finally giving it a go, and while there isn’t anything inherently broken about it, it did leave me rather underwhelmed in terms of the gameplay, along with a few questionable design choices.
At its heart, Dreadful Meadows is all about growing the best spooky farm you can, filled with sweets and haunted harvesters, and trying to create an engine to get the most points. Each player picks a confectioner to represent them, each with their own special perk such as discounts at the market or treating certain tiles as wild.
You’ll start with a small meadow made up of a couple of sweet-producing tiles, each one creating a different type of sweet worth a certain amount of money. Those sweets are your currency, and you’ll spend them to expand your meadow, hire harvesters, or complete concoctions (which are basically big sweet recipes worth victory points).
On your turn, you choose one of a handful of actions. You can buy new tiles from the market, pop down a Sugar Sprite (a little helper that grows sweets on the surrounding tiles), pick up your sprites to trigger their bonuses, or invest in a harvester to rake in more sweets and points later on by creating chains that make harvesting easier and quicker. It’s essentially an engine-building economy game with a spooky, family-friendly aesthetic as opposed to the usual industrial revolution aesthetic many of them go for. Your sprites generate sweets, harvesters boost production, and the sweets you make let you buy more land to build on.
There’s also a bit of tile-laying strategy going on because your meadow grows outwards as you buy new tiles. Some actions depend on how your tiles are placed, especially harvesters, which need to be completely surrounded before they can go down. When you do get one in place though, they score big points and can cause satisfying chain reactions when Sugar Sprites start harvesting next to them.
You’re constantly deciding whether to spend your sweets now to grow faster or save them up to complete one of your concoction cards for those all-important victory points. Dreadful Trees are the rarest sweet type and act as wilds, which gives you a nice bit of flexibility when trying to complete concoction cards
The game keeps ticking along until one of a few things runs out – the harvesters, the tiles, or the concoction deck – and then everyone totals up their points from completed concoctions, harvesters, clusters of matching tiles, and leftover sweets. Most points wins.
I really, really wanted to like Dreadful Meadows, as I love the aesthetic and I generally actually quite like engine-building games, but for some reason, because of the fact that there wasn’t really much in the way of sort of powers or cool things you could do with the engine, it just all got a bit dull because all you’re really doing is placing a sprite, getting a lot of sweets, using some of those sweets to buy stuff, some of those sweets to make concoctions, and then doing that again. I never really felt there was a massive amount of choice going on. The shop only has four things of a potential five, so you’re always at the mercy of what’s in the shop and what you can buy, and because you’re trying to lay out the tiles so that you get the bonuses for larger collective fields at the end, you never really have to think too much about placement.
Getting a new concoction card also seemed to be a bit more irritating than it should have been. Essentially, to get that, you have to lay a sprite on a Dreadful Meadow tile and then remove that sprite to get another concoction card. So realistically, even if you have the stuff, it takes you like three turns to get a new concoction card kind of going, and just doing that over and over again once you’ve got a good engine wasn’t the most interesting gameplay.
It also takes a really long time. For this sort of game, I think 20–30 minutes would have been about right, but as it was, because you’re waiting for all of the tiles to run out in most cases (because you certainly aren’t getting through the concoction deck), we found the game probably took about an hour. While I have no issue playing a game for an hour, when you’re literally doing the same thing over and over again, just kind of regenerating your engines that most of us had kind of built probably within the first third of the game, it just seemed like it dragged on quite a bit.
Now, it’s worth noting here that we got the retail version and not the deluxe version, but there were some clear issues with this that I don’t usually expect to see in what was otherwise a really nicely presented package. Issue number one is the board. The board is folded in a way that when you unfold it, getting it to go completely flat is basically impossible, which meant that because you’re supposed to put all of the tokens onto the board, they kind of slide about a bit, which was really quite annoying as everything didn’t quite work. The tokens themselves are fine – they are small and quite fiddly – and the tiles themselves are actually quite large. The problem with this being that you’re supposed to put the tiles into the bag and shuffle them around so you don’t know what you’re pulling out, but because the tiles are so big, they’re quite hard to shuffle. It’s kind of like if I said to you, put a load of cardboard tiles into a bag that’s relatively tight and then actually shuffle them around – it just doesn’t really work.
Finally, 2 of the sweets have almost identical colours, which would be very hard to differentiate, especially under low light.
I really wanted to like Dreadful Meadows. I like the aesthetic, and I know it’s a game that has got its fans, but generally speaking, I was left extremely underwhelmed, and I can’t see us ever playing it again. If you really like engine-building economy games, then there might be something here for you, as it’s obviously using a very different aesthetic to what they normally do, but as it was, there just wasn’t enough here for me to find enjoyable, and the kids equally were desperate to play something else halfway through, but to their own credit, they did finish.
