Wispwood

Wispwood was a Spiel Essen release from CGE that runs counter to the company's recent output of medium-to-heavy weight euro games like Lost Ruins of Arnak and SETI. It's a light tile drafting and pattern-building game designed by Reed Ambrose.

There's an irrelevant backstory to the game about a cat being lost in a forest but pay it no heed because Wispwood is really an abstract game. The 1-4 players are drafting colourful will-o'-the-wisp tiles from a pond (ie: central display). You must place each wisp in your individual tableau along with tree tiles in the polyomino pattern indicated to the side of the tile you drafted. You have cards that score you points for the patterns formed with particular tiles but the limitation on placement is that all the tiles in the first round have to fit inside a 4 x 4 grid. This becomes a 5 x 5 grid in round two and a 6 x 6 grid in the third and final round.

Players each have a cat marker but that's just used to allow a special action: refilling the tiles in the pond display or allowing a player to use a pattern of tree tiles that's not adjacent to the tile they draft. The cat's special power is ordinarily single use (you flip the cat marker to indicate you've used it) but you can flip your cat back to its active side if you take a 'tree' action: foregoing the drafting of a wisp tile and instead drawing 1-3 tree tiles to place anywhere in your grid. A key element to Wispwood is that the pond display doesn't automatically refresh as tiles are taken, so that's something else you need to factor in when making your selection...

What makes the game most interesting is that not only does the grid increase in size each round but the tree tiles are all removed at the end of the first two rounds. That means the coloured tiles - the ones for whose patterns you'll be scoring - remain in place. The net result is that you can expect to rack up notably higher scores each round. That gives Wispwood a developing arc and leaves players, win or lose, feeling increasingly satisfied with their turns.

Wispwood is attractively presented, with art by Stepán Drasták. Tho' some of the scoring patterns can be a little tricky to pull off, it's a very accessible game with straightforward and mostly intuitive rules, so a game that can be used as a gateway for introducing modern board games to players who haven't previously played other pattern building games. Most of our plays at Board's Eye View have taken a reasonably brisk 30-40 minutes, so this is a game that's unlikely to overstay its welcome.

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