Parks Second Edition Board Game Review
Parks is a game I’ve had a love-hate relationship with, but one of my biggest gripes with the original was that it felt a bit disjointed, and not much like an actual board game. This has been changed in big ways with the Second Edition printing, moving all the components over to a central board, providing players with their own player boards, and so much more. You can check out our components article here where we go over a lot of the changes in the second edition, but now let’s talk about how these changes come together.
Parks was and still is a really loved game so I’m sure the changes in this second edition are going to be divisive for some. The game mixes the base game with elements of the various expansions, and while I personally think it’s a huge improvement, I think your mileage will vary depending on how much you enjoyed the original.
In Parks, players will be moving hikers across a trail collecting resources and visiting parks. Each player has two hikers they can move, with the person taking up the rear always going next. The catch is that two players cannot occupy the same space on the trail, unless spending their once-per-season campfire. Determining where you want to go on the trail, and what you need to visit various parks, takes a lot more strategy and critical thinking than you might imagine.
As you travel along the trail, you’ll take photos for additional points, reserve parks to visit later, collect canteens and passion cards that provide goals and bonuses, and so much more. Parks is not a hard game to understand, but I would argue it’s pretty hard to master, especially if you are playing with very strategic players.
Parks Second Edition now feels like a proper board game, and that is a big deal to me. In my opinion, everything feels more cohesive with this release. It’s a lot brighter as well, which is a nice change from the dreary colour of the original (mind you that colour did fit the idea of visiting a park). It’s the mechanical changes that I really like though, although for engine building fans that might not be the case.
One of the big changes in this release is the ability to visit multiple parks at once. Now, resources allowing, you can visit multiple parks in a single turn. That has, of course, changed how the Tool cards work; previously, these would (often) provide you discounts on visiting parks, but they have removed that and instead provided you bonuses for going to certain places instead.
That breaks the original engine building mechanic where you would get cards that allowed discounts, stacking those discounts to get parks cheaper. The new cards do allow you to chain abilities, though, so for combo-tastic folks, this might make you pretty excited!
Goal cards are also changed, now called Passion cards. They require players to perform a specific action, and once that action has been performed, the card can be flipped and players have the choice whether to use that card as an ongoing benefit, or whether to use it for scoring. I am a sucker for games that use multi-use cards, and so this new system feels amazing.
The decision making here is phenomenal: do I take ongoing benefits or do I use that scoring card as a way to direct my strategy? This is an amazing inclusion, and again, a preference for me over the original.
Another positive change is how canteens work in this new release. In the original, when you collected a water token you would look at your available canteens and choose which benefit to get. In this version, the canteen is now on your player board, and you will populate that board with various benefit tokens.
There are two columns of 3 that you can fill. When you move a water to your canteen, you’ll place it in the center column and earn the benefit on the left and right of that water token. This provides players more choice on what they want to earn when using a canteen, and with the right strategy, could actually pay off in big ways.
Here are a few other changes I enjoyed, but was not nearly as excited about as what we talked about above:
- The inclusion of the Nightfall Expansion into the base (Second Edition) game is awesome – going to a tent location provides a great bonus to players without adding much to the rules teach!
- Season arrows provide a nice bonus to whomever collects the most of a specific something. It’s minor, but a nice way to earn more stuff and can provide strategic direction to a season.
There are a few things I perhaps wasn’t as excited about. While the Sun and Water tokens will technically fall on different actions, they are always in the same location season after season. The variability of those moving around in the original release was a bit more interesting, in my opinion. Another thing I wasn’t a huge fan of was the new camera rules. In the original, you needed to take the camera and have it in your possession to snap photos. This was another gameplay element you needed to consider, which made for some really good choices throughout the game. In the Second Edition, anyone can take a picture, whether you have the camera or not – the camera simply allows you to take two photos instead of one.
Overall, I do think that Parks Second Edition is a major improvement over the original. While there are a few things I enjoyed about the original Parks release – despite not loving the game as a whole – I think the improvements made in this Second Edition will keep me coming back for more. Parks might not be a game that I love, but it’s one that I will now play on a regular basis, and I think that’s pretty high praise!
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Article By Adam Roffel
