Takahe’s Solo Den: Boonlake

1-4 Players 80-160 minutes Age 14+

Designer: Alexander Pfister

Artist: Klemens Franz

Publisher: dlp games, Capstone Games

A perfectly biased foreword…

I currently own 6 of solo-enabled Alexander Pfister’s games and immensely enjoy every single one of them. Blackout: Hong Kong, Maracaibo, Great Western Trail, CloudAge, Expedition to Newdale… all of these beautiful, medium-weight euros are an absolute delight to play. Sure, many of them share similarities among themselves, but each one is distinct enough to provide a different experience fully justifying its existence. The same can be easily said about Boonlake – another rock-solid euro from this designer that has been released not long ago. How does the newest addition to my Pfister Collection compare to the rest of his portfolio?

Looking for a solid theme? Move along… move along…

First thing first – this game is pretty much theme-less. Compared to thematically well executed Great Western Trail or Maracaibo, first couple of games can feel quite abstract, dry and purely “mathematical” as both -the thematic flavouring and art direction- are simply very vague and all over the place (like why does the rulebook and some cardboard components have those cyberpunk-style lines and pointers when the game is about cattle and… settlers… in 19-20th century? I guess? Who knows!)… but that’s perfectly fine. The core gameplay stew Alex Pfister is serving us here is such a well-balanced and meaty one that it easily compensates for the lack of thematic glue that would have “sticked it all” together.

As mentioned already, Boonlake is a straight up medium-weight euro – this time without any campaign or scenario-based options, which is what really elevated the gameplay for me in some of Pfister’s previous titles (CloudAge, Maracaibo…). Is the game less fun or addictive because of that? Nope! It is obvious the designer wanted to go a slightly different route with this one – concentrate on having all gameplay mechanisms interlinked without any emphasis on thematic integration. The result? Game that plays so incredibly well, you simply forget about the missing stuff this author is known for.

Shaken but not stirred… a well made euro-cocktail of the finest ingredients!

Ok, enough fluff talk – let’s talk about what makes this game “tick” for me. At its core, Boonlake is a hybrid of multiple proven’n’tested euro mechanisms (unsurprisingly). You have a board with action tiles depicting a variety of things to do, plus the number of steps your boat will move down-stream, serving as a timer of sorts (the more steps you move, the quicker the game ends). You also have to either play or discard a card (cards give you one-time and/or end-game scoring bonuses) of the same symbol depicted on the action tile so having a solid pool and variety of cards is essential.

As to how do you pay for cards – game uses 2 types of tokenised resources (money and vases (?)) and 4 types of tracked ones, which you track on your own player board. The way these 4 are tracked and maintained? Just have a look at the pic below, top left part of the board…. Essentially, you slot-in production sites into recessed slots and you also move your boats left/right to add 1 or even 2 to that particular resource. Enough abstract for you? :-D

Player board

VPs is all you need…

So, what are you actually trying to do here? Surprise – score as many victory points as possible. For that, you need to fulfil requirements on 4 scoring tiles, play cards and most importantly, “clean” your cluttered board. Cluttered with houses, settlements, and cattle, all of which must be placed on the board in order to expose a bonus underneath (coins or vps or both) that can be collected up to 4 times during the play. However, before you can develop (place your stuff on) any hexagonal land on the board, you first need to explore it. Exploration is a good old fashioned tile placement as we know from other games – you take a building site from the stack and slap it on top of an empty hexagon space with the most desirable bonus for you (following some basic adjacency rules in the process). You follow the same principle with pastures. Nothing ground-breaking but a nice element of interactivity, providing some tactical options for those who prefer playing that particular way.

Once you’ve done that, you have to follow a sequence of development – first you place your inhabitant and only after you’ve done that, you can replace him with house and eventually with a chunky settlement. You might be wondering – why upgrading if it can become quite costly and tricky (due to requirements)? Those vps and coins printed on your player board my friend… those can really ramp-up your end of round scoring (4x per game) because when you upgrade, you do NOT place the previous piece back on your board (something I hated in Gaia Project and it didn’t make sense at all!), thus leaving the end of round bonus permanently exposed.

Probably the most interesting and refreshing part of player board are slots for levers – you can buy these levers through one of the action tiles and once you place them into one of your empty slots, you can then “pull” that lever down to activate the depicted bonus. These levers are then reset back after each end of round scoring, plus you get some nice vps for unused ones as well. Such a cool and neat idea, love pulling them levers! Oh and the more you get, the more you score for them at the end of the game so definitely shouldn’t be ignored!

Solo without Han, yet still offering tons of fun!

Ok so how is the game from the solo perspective, against the automated opponent called The Wise Eminence? In 1 word? Amazing. There are 3 full pages dedicated to the rules for solo bot which makes the solo game a bit more engaging than your typical worker-blocking viticulture style affair. You flip one of the player boards to the other side and voila – that’s the board for the solo player. Wise Eminence uses only some components (they don’t use inhabitants for instance) but still does a vast majority of things you do, such as exploring, developing, placing pastures and cattle etc. Solo bot’s actions are controlled by solo tiles and these tiles also dictate what the bot wants to do and where it places building site / pasture tiles, buildings and such. I guess the only slight problem I had with the rules was the placement of automa’s cattle – the wording wasn’t strictly speaking clear and had to re-word it to make sense out of it. Other than that, the rest of the rules are well laid-out and I have yet to face a scenario that is not covered in rulebook.

Board used for solo game

Now why do I think the solo is amazing – it’s the action board itself. You see, the automa will always develop or put cattle on pastures IF the corresponding action tiles are at the bottom of the action board (pic below). If those two are not present, they just move their scoring tracker on their board one step forward and continue with their second round of actions. What it means is that you are more or less in control of how much they end up scoring from developing and placing their cattle since you yourself decide how many times they have such opportunity (by using those action tiles and placing them at the bottom of the action board). So it’s a bit of a cat and mouse game here as you’re trying to score points by all the available means but not too much through your buildings and cattle because that would made the Wise Eminence rank up their scoring as well. The fact that you have a direct influence on what automa does (similarly to how Conarius is driven by your actions in Concordia – also a top notch solo!) makes for some deliciously crunchy moments of deep thinking and complex decision making.

Action board with action selection tiles

“Simple fact - Germans know how to desing the best euros on the market”
Takahe Pukeko

Yeah… I can’t praise the solo mode in Boonlake enough. It’s just so wonderfully implemented; every single aspect of the multiplayer works perfectly in solo too – and the game itself offers a well balanced mix of euro-mechanics in such a tight symbiosis, I am finding really hard faulting anything here. Ok… maybe one small nit-pick – The Wise Eminence moves down the stream quite quickly so the solo game can be really quick… which is a good thing (in my opinion), but this means you won’t be able to ponder around for too long and will have to up your game a bit, otherwise you won’t achieve anything. But that’s really it – I got nothing else. This is an outstanding medium-euro you should definitely check out and I am super excited about Pfister’s upcoming title, Skymines, promising even more crunchy euro-goodness. And of course, the game will include a solo bot as well. Happy days!