Overparked
- Board's Eye View
- Jul 25
- 2 min read
Designed by Daryl Chow and published by Origame, Overparked is a colourful polyomino game where the 1-5 players are all trying to optimise the parking in their parking lots (individual player boards). The cars and trucks you place, and their relative positions, are determined by the tile you play: you have a starting hand of two randomly dealt tiles but your tiles otherwise come from those available in a rondel.
Players are competing to earn points by completing objectives ahead of their opponents but it's principally the rondel that provides the main player interaction in Overparked. The lead player on a turn selects their own choice of tile by rotating a steering wheel so that their colour aligns with their choice of tile; that tho' simultaneously determines the tiles that must be taken by each of the other players. In our plays at Board's Eye View we've found that players mostly just focus on which tile best suits their own needs but there are some stages of the game where a bit of 'hate drafting' can come in and a player settles for a sub-optimal choice for themselves in the knowledge that the tile they are forcing on an opponent is particularly unhelpful.
Gameplay is simple: you're always playing a tile from your hand, taking the indicated vehicles and placing them out in accordance with the pattern on the tile. Placement is super-easy at first but you're increasingly at risk of finding that you can't park all the vehicles in the lot in the specified pattern because spaces are already blocked by other vehicles. There's limited scope for moving vehicles but you're likely eventually to find you don't have space for a vehicle. In those circumstances the vehicle is moved to the 'overparked' section of your board where it will score negative points at the end of the game. When you completely fill a quadrant of your parking lot, however, you get to take a token that you can spend to remove a vehicle from your 'overparked' section - saving you from its end-game penalty.
Scoring can seem a bit more fiddly than the main gameplay. In addition to the objectives and the special scoring requirements of certain trucks, players score for their largest areas of each colour. Casual players will tend to focus on making best use of their parking space but more seriously competitive players will try to plan ahead with their tiles and placement in the hope of also maximising their areas of contiguous colours.
Tho' you can play Overparked as a light family game it can be a challenging puzzler to play well; so all the more satisfying when you're able to rack up a high score. It's attractively presented by Origame, with art from Tansan Inc. There are wooden vehicles for claiming objectives and shiny cardboard pieces to shunt around your parking lot.
