Overgrowth
- Board's Eye View
- 1 hour ago
- 2 min read
Tho' there's a notional theme about competing wild flowers, Overgrowth is a two-player abstract strategy game designed by Kirsty Buley, Mike Cleeton and Phil Fox, and published by Ludus Vulpes. It's beautifully produced, with a wooden board and two bags of wooden pieces. Players each use 25 wooden pieces to play the game and the object is to be the first to build a continuous line of your tokens from the shaded area on one edge of the board to the shaded area on the opposite side. Alternatively, the game ends when a player has used all 25 of their wooden tokens, with the win going to the player with the most tokens on the board.
The board incorporates a 7 x 7 square grid but this playing area is surrounded by an action selection rondel. On your turn you move your action selection marker up to three spaces on the rondel to select which of the four actions you want to take. This means in effect that you can usually take any action except the one you took on your previous turn, tho' players' action selection markers cannot share the same space, so you may be able to block your opponent from taking a particular action.
The four actions available to players are Grow (add a single token orthogonally or diagonally adjacent to one you already have on the board); Cast (place a token exactly three spaces away from an already placed token); Spread (place two tokens, horizontally side by side, so that at least one of the tokens is orthogonally adjacent to an already placed token; and Overgrow (remove an opponent's token from the game and replace with one of your own provided the targeted token has yours orthogonally adjacent on two sides.
Overgrowth is easy to learn and it plays quickly: each of our plays at Board's Eye View has taken just 10-15 minutes. Most have been won or lost by a player successfully building a connecting line. The game permits diagonal connections, so some members of our team got caught out on their first plays as they didn't immediately notice these. As players become more experienced at both building and blocking, so we began to find the area majority win condition kicking in. It's possible that a player could seize an area majority win through generous use of the Spread action but usually the win will go to the player who has made the most use of the Overgrow action, as that always completely removes an opponent's token from the game.
