Yonder
- Board's Eye View
- 5 minutes ago
- 3 min read
We've seen designer Haaken Hoel Gaarder and publishers Sinister Fish move from Villagers to Streets and even to the Moon. That series of games together formed something of a trilogy, tracing human settlements across the centuries from the Medieval period to the foreseeable future. Tho' Yonder has some recognisable similarities that show its heritage, this game takes us to a parallel world populated with fantasy figures. It's also a game that's on a grander scale and one that comes in a correspondingly bigger box.
Yonder is a worker placement game where the 1–5 players are making use of workers from various fantasy races by sending them to the locations on the board. Goblins are basic grunts with no special abilities; skeletons are similarly basic but, unlike all the other workers, they never need feeding; dwarves need fewer resources at certain locations; elves can double up on spaces on the board that would otherwise be blocked by other workers; ogres collect double the number of resources at a location, albeit that when they need to be fed they demand twice as much food. There's a Favour Track you can move up in order to reap benefits and you can trade resources for arcana that likewise give you a benefit. Mostly, however, Yonder is all about collecting the various resources and spending them to construct buildings and to fulfil contracts. The buildings can potentially give you more of an engine to boost the effectiveness of your actions but you're earning points primarily by fulfilling contracts.
In most worker placement games each player has their own supply of workers. That's not the case in Yonder. In this game, the workers arrive each round on boats like hordes of fantasy world asylum seekers. They are welcome migrants, however: players draft them by the boatload. Most will disappear at the end of the next round but those placed on players' buildings rather than on the board will remain and be available on the following round to the player who owns that building. That's provided, of course, that that player can feed them. If you don't have food for them, they too will disappear but their dissatisfaction will also incur penalty points...
As players add buildings so they create more locations for workers to visit in order to take the actions that they enable. But you don't have exclusive use of your own buildings; other players can put workers out on your buildings to take those buildings' actions. That potentially gives an opponent use of the worker in the next round but it makes them liable for feeding the worker. In Yonder it can therefore be quite an aggressive Trojan Horse 'take that' action to place a worker on another player's building.
Tho' you'll want to take contracts in order to score points, contracts commit you to meeting them in every round of the game: if you take a contract and you find in a future round that you're unable to meet its requirements then you'll be hit with penalty points!
In the UK, the arrival of boatloads of asylum seekers and/or illegal economic migrants is a cause of much political controversy, with successive governments promising to 'Stop the boats' or 'Smash the gangs' responsible for launching them. Government must be easier in the fantasy world of Yonder because in this game the boats all stop in the penultimate round of the game. That would doubtless be welcome news for anti-immigration campaigners but it's not such good news for those with an ongoing commitment to fulfilling contracts. Players who haven't constructed a self-sustaining engine from their buildings face a punishing last couple of rounds; you'll need to have workers placed in your buildings and fed in order to be able to have a successful endgame.
Appearances can be deceptive. Despite its cute box art and theme, Yonder is a medium-weight eurogame. It doesn't come with a heavy rules overhead so basic gameplay is straightforward but it's unforgiving of players who don't plan adequately for its 'Stop the boats' game arc. Perhaps it's also a political allegory?
