Garden Lake
- Board's Eye View
- Mar 7
- 2 min read
Uwe Rosenberg often makes use of polyomino tiles in his board game designs, tho' in many of his other games the polyominoes form just one of several mechanics in play. Not so here in Garden Lake from Czech publishers Albi. This is a tableau building game for 1-4 players where each player is laying polyomino tiles on their individual board.
You're scoring for each completed row and column on your board. The tiles show fish on one side and waterlilies on the other, and you'll additionally score for groups of these on adjacent tiles. Players each start off with 16 randomly drawn polyomino tiles set out in a line surrounding your board and, on your turn, you can use the tile at either end of the line or you can take and use the tile at the ends closest to you of your neighbouring player(s). You can also earn bonus tiles by covering particular areas of the board.
If that sounds simple, it's because it is. Garden Lake is a relatively straightforward puzzle optimisation game where each turn you'll be choosing which tile to play and making choices about its optimal placement. What makes the game particularly tricky, however, is the fact that, unusually, the polyominoes in players' lines are all seven squares in size. These heptominoes come in some highly irregular shapes, making them a real pain to interlock.
Tho' you can use tiles from neighbouring players Garden Lake is very much a game of multiplayer solitaire. That even extends to game length: the game ends for you when you cannot place any of the tiles available to you but other players can go on taking turns until they too have no legal placements. The game's Japanese garden theme is very Zen but if your plays are anything like ours at Board's Eye View you'll find this puzzle game can be quite stressful rather than the tranquil experience you might have expected from the theme.
The game comes with alternative boards, so different triggers for bonus tiles, and you can optionally play 'advanced' rules that allow you to draft 'decoration' tiles that increase the points values of adjacent groups of koi carp and waterlilies. These don't materially affect playing time, which is around 40-60 minutes, depending on player count.
