Matthew BaileyThank you to everyone for all of the kind words about Henry(1)’s trip to the hospital on Saturday. You will be pleased to know he is now home and relatively well having spent a decent chunk of the last few days being cuddled and sitting in bed with me watching Cocomelon… so much… Cocomelon. (Have included a smiley photo of him saying hi to everyone).
Now the second game we played on that faithful Saturday was “Project L” a tile-laying, engine-building marketplace kinda game. Played by myself, Jack(7) and Toby(4)
The rules of “Project L” are relatively simple. You start with a level 1 piece (a small square) and a level 2 piece (a rectangle double the size of the square). The point of the game is to take puzzle cards and using your pieces fill in these shapes and therefore earn points. Puzzle cards are arranged in 2 rows (white & black) with white being easier and fewer points and black being harder and more.
On your turn, you can do the do 3 of the following 6 actions (and all can be done more than once excluding the “master action”).
1) Take: Take any one puzzle tile from one of the rows and place it above your Player mat. You can have a maximum of 4 unfinished puzzles.
2) Upgrade/Downgrade/Side grade: This allows you to upgrade a piece by one level, downgrade it by one level or swap it with a different piece of that level.
3) Recycle: This allows you to shuffle all of the puzzles on a row back and draw new puzzles (we never did this)
4) Take a new level 1 square
5) Place a piece on one of your puzzles
6) Master Action (can only be done once per turn): place a piece on every one of your puzzles at once.
When you complete a puzzle card you get a new puzzle piece as a reward along with some points.
The game ends when there are no back cards left. Most points win
Firstly let’s start by saying we all absolutely loved this. Polyomino/Tetronimo games are popular in our household, and this is just different enough to make it a keeper.
Immediately all 3 of us went into different tactics. I decided to try and get multiple puzzles to best use the “master mechanic”, Toby(4) decided to stockpile simple straight pieces as he decided they were more versatile than the unusually shaped pieces (I can’t remember his exact words as he definitely didn’t say versatile but I got that’s what he meant) and Jack(7) went for big pieces and tried to pick cards he could fill quickly.
In the end, Toby saw I was about to score big and quickly ended the game winning overall (cheeky cheekster).
It’s a weird mix of other game types but it’s an amalgamation that works really well.
Component Quality is super high. The cards are high quality and double-layered. The pieces themselves are made of high-quality “Bakelite” style plastic similar to the pieces in Hive and it’s all presented in a very classy box.
Now not all versions of Project L are created equal. We have the retail version which comes with fewer pieces than the Kickstarter version (which means fewer players can play). There are also a few expansions that we don’t have (but have considered) including the “ghost” expansion that adds a larger level 5 pieces. Either way, if you are buying second-hand and you can find the Kickstarter version for a good price it’s worth it over the retail release.
The company have recently announced it is going out of business so it is likely this will not see a reprint.
We really like Project L ad best of all it comes in a fairly small box compared to similar games putting it in the “games we will probably take on holiday at some point if we didn’t have 3 kids and going on holiday is more of a “memory making opportunity” than an actual holiday” pile.
So yes waffling aside this is a really good game that I would recommend.
