Countryside

Nanox Games and dlp have packaged Countryside in an unprepossessing box - half the size of most board games - but of all the games we picked up at Spiel Essen 2025 this has become our most played. There's nothing novel about the theme: the 1-4 players are managing their own farms, but Peter Prinz's design seamlessly melds several core eurogame mechanisms to come up with a very satisfying 60-minute game.

Tho' there's a modular board for keeping score and for setting out the various shared objectives, and players have individual boards to keep track of their actions, Countryside is primarily a card game which makes use of multi-use cards. Players start off with their choice of three area cards of the five they are dealt. These represent the five different areas of a farm: meadow, field, garden, house and barn. They show the number of 'projects' (ie: all other type of cards) that the area card can accommodate and offer another potential scoring objective that only you can make use of.

Players also start with a hand of project cards. These all show the type of card (for example: tree, fruit, crop, animal or farm worker), which area(s) it can be played to and the cost in sunshine of placing the card out on your farm. Each of the project cards also shows that card's effect when played; either individual to that card or dependent on the presence of other specific cards in that area or elsewhere in your farm.

Players each have four worker meeples and on your turn you place one of them out on the location on the left-hand side of your individual board that represents the action you want to take. Initially your choice is to place out a card with a cost of up to 5 sunshine; play a card using 3 sunshine but supplemented with an additional sunshine for each card discarded; use 2 sunshine to play a card and draw two adjacent cards from the seven card market display; or draw four adjacent cards from the market display. In addition, you can use a worker to add an additional area to your farm and you'll need to deploy a worker when you want to claim (fulfil) shared and/or individual objectives. If you have money, which you'll generate once your project cards are in play and generating produce that can be sold, you can spend coins as additional sunshine. Cards can have a sunshine cost of up to 10 so you're likely to find you ultimately need to do this, tho' it won't be an option for you in the early stages of the game.

The worker placement actions mean players will be involved in open drafting - tho' subject to the limitation that the cards they draft must be adjacent: they can't be taken from just anywhere in the market display. You'll be looking for set collection synergies between your cards and the various objectives, and canny players will be using the cards they play to build an engine that gives them produce that will let them score relevant objectives and/or be converted into cash.

A further worker placement option is to recall your workers. You'll obviously need to do that when all four workers have been placed out but you can always do it sooner, which you might want to do if, for example, you want to use a worker placement action on which you already have a worker. We especially liked the fact that, unlike many other games, the recall action isn't a wasted turn because, depending on the number of workers recalled, you get to take one or more of the unlocked actions on the right-hand side of your board.

Whenever you fulfil an objective you mark it by taking a token from your player board, so unlocking another action slot where you can place a meeple. Some objectives score a lot more points than others; there are some that score you no points at all but may still be worth doing in order to unlock another action spot. Some are scored merely by having in place the requirements of an objective while others require you to trade in (ie: sacrifice) whatever is indicated on the objective. A strength of the production from Nanox and dlp is that tho' there's a lot of iconography in Countryside, it's all pretty clear: this isn't a game where the players will be clutching the rulebook all through the game to decode the cards. That said, we'd have liked it if the indicator for discarding goods, cards or coins was more distinctive.

The standout feature of Countryside is its gameplay arc. For the first several turns, it's very much a hand management game where you'll be drafting cards but won't necessarily be able to play many of them to your farm. There's a 12-card hand limit and you're likely to hit that and have to decide what to discard; perhaps with the knowledge that you have a card in hand that, when played, will let you recover a card from the discard pile. In our plays at Board's Eye View, we've often found we're 20 minutes into the game before any player has scored a single objective. The game hits a tipping point, however, as players' farm engines kick in and objectives are scored with increasing rapidity...

Alizée Favier's beautiful artwork gives Countryside a table presence that certainly adds to the game's appeal. Tho' this is a medium-weight eurogame, we've found it's a game that 'non-gamers' want to play. Maybe one to move onto as a step up in complexity for those who enjoy playing Forest Shuffle (Lookout Games). The game works at all player counts, including adapted for solitaire play, but for us the sweet spot is as a two-player game.

(Review by Selwyn Ward)

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