Lodge
- Board's Eye View
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Peter McPherson is perhaps best known as the designer of Tiny Towns (AEG), which can turn into a challenging puzzler as players' individual boards fill. Lodge is his latest design and it's being brought to Kickstarter by Pickpocket Games.
Lodge is a tile drafting game themed around accommodating guests in a ski lodge. Instead of adding buildings to a town, the 1-4 players in Lodge are adding rooms to their ski lodge. Tiles represent rooms in your lodge and are distinguished by colour (and icon, for players with impaired colour vision). On your turn, you draft any tile from those in a 4 x 4 market display. The proviso is that whichever level the tile is at in the display is the level at which it has to be placed in your lodge: you can only take the tile from the top row of the display if you can place it on the top (4th floor) row of your lodge. Everyone starts off with one tile and the room tiles that you draft can only be placed orthogonally adjacent to an existing room tile. As you might expect, you can't place rooms on a floor of your lodge unless there is a room below it.
You're building your lodge with the aim of accommodating guests. You start off with one guest in your lobby and there are always four guests queueing on the board. Each shows two colours. To accommodate a guest you simply have to have two adjacent vacant rooms matching the two colours shown on the guest token. You can place a guest from your lobby and/or from the display, and every guest you accommodate will score you 2 points, but you can increase the points value for any guest who is accommodated on their preferred storey...
As an alternative to drafting a room tile you can take and 'build' an amenity tile in your lodge. Each of the amenity tiles adds an additional way of scoring; for example, having rooms of a certain colour adjacent to the amenity or having an exact number of tiles of a particular colour.
It's optimising the placement of tiles and guests, and synergising your placements with amenity tiles, that deliver the puzzle-solving element of the game. You can generally plan ahead because you can always keep a guest in your lobby, tho' the display of available rooms and amenities will obviously change before your next turn, obviously moreso in a four-player game.
Tho' guests and amenity tiles are replaced, the room tiles in the display don't automatically refresh. You ordinarily only move tiles down and fill the 4 x 4 grid back up when all the tiles in a row have been taken. Moving tiles down before the grid is refilled gives players the opportunity to manipulate the grid...
The game ends after a player has accommodated 12 guests in their lodge but this isn't a race game: being first to 12 by no means guarantees you the win because guests in their preferred floor score more and you can rack up higher scores by fulfilling the requirements of amenities.
Lodge is easy to teach and learn, making it a great option as a gateway game for introducing people to modern board games. The rules are simple and quickly grokked but there's still enough here to interest seasoned gamers who want a more cutthroat game. At Board's Eye View it wasn't long before players were 'hate drafting' to deliberately deny rivals the colour and level of tiles they needed to maximise the score.
Pickpocket Games are bringing Lodge to Kickstarter. Click here to check out the campaign, and if you're checking it out ahead of the KS launch you can use this link to pay a $1 returnable deposit and get the 'Hospitality' expansion (value $15) added for free.