Evenglow

Designed by Jason Katzwinkel, with appealing art from Clémentine Campardou, Evenglow is an alchemy-themed puzzle optimisation, pattern building, tile placement game from The Op where the 1–4 players are laying out plant tiles in corresponding positions on their day and night boards. Every turn you play a card that shows four plants. You orient the card to show the two tiles you draw for positioning on your two boards and all the other players must draw and place on their boards the two other tiles indicated.

That's how turns work; you have choice of what tiles you'll collect on your own turn but on other turns the tiles you take will usually simply be those that the active player doesn't want. The active player's tile selection can involve a degree of 'hate drafting' - taking a tile not so much because you need it but to deny it to an opponent - but from our plays at Board's Eye View that was mainly a phenomenon in two-player head-to-head contests; 'hate drafting' was rarely seen in games with three or four players.

The meat of the game is the puzzle optimisation problem of where to place your tiles. Each plant scores in a different way; for vines, you'll score a point for every tile in the largest connected group on each of your two boards. The tiles only count as connected, however, if at least one stem joins up with an adjacent tile, so you need to be careful over the orientation of these tiles when you place them. Likewise vine leaves score only when connected to your largest grouping of vines on each board.

Tile orientation does not matter for other plants but they all score for each discrete grouping of adjacent tiles that have the exact number required: henbane for pairs, lion's mane for groups of three, mandrake for groups of four and elderberries for groups of five. Groupings that exceed the indicated number score nothing. Henbane scores extra points if neither tile is on the perimeter of a board; elderberries score extra for any tile that is on the perimeter.

There's more. Players earn potion cards when they complete a qualifying grouping: lion's mane grouped in a triangle, four mandrake grouped in a straight line, or any configuration of five elderberries. When you have a qualifying group, you mark it by placing a 'harvest' token on it and you draw the corresponding potion card. The cards can be used during any player's turn for their various special single-use abilities: to swap the position of any two of your placed tiles, to draft one of the plant tiles selected by the active player, or to replace with your choice of plant a tile on either of your boards. You flip a potion card when you use it. Regardless of whether or not they've been used for their ability, the cards are worth end-game points plus a bonus for every set of three different potion cards.

Evenglow is a strangely satisfying mix. Turns are super-simple but players have a meaty challenge to optimise their tile placements, particularly as you're having to place tiles in the corresponding positions on your two boards. Canny use of potions can help to correct mistakes (swapping tiles, for example, can be a way of reorientating sub-optimally positioned vines and leaves). Use of a potion can trigger collection of another potion card but the game rules wisely limits cascade effects by restricting players from activating more than one card during any player's turn.

The Op have included rules and components for solitaire play and there are simplified rules offered as a 'family variant'. With the latter you leave out the potions and aspects of scoring that younger players might find overly fiddly, like ensuring that vine stems are connected. You might want to play this dumbed-down version on a first play but even relatively young children will quickly graduate to the full game. Our plays of Evenglow have mostly come in at around 30-40 minutes. Because everyone takes and places tiles on every player's turn, Evenglow has no downtime and player count doesn't materially affect playing time.

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