Lowlands Review

Feeling sheepish? Longing for the fresh air and honest work of that tragically underused theme, farming? Lowlands might well be perfect for lovers of Uwe Rosenberg and those who want to make sheep for wood jokes in a whole new context, but it’s pretty fantastic for everyone else too. Let’s get the lowdown on Lowlands.

Players: 2-4
Time: 50-100 mins
Designer: Claudia Partenheimer, Ralf Partenheimer
Artist: Andrea Boekhoff
Publisher: Feuerland Spiele, Z-Man Games

A new hot game theme is apparently “how wet Holland is”, with Pandemic Rising Tide and now Lowlands exploring the rapidly waterlogged landscape of that barely-above-sea-level state. Even the player boards offer you a rainy side option! I’m not 100% sure why the sudden interest in this setting, but I’m guessing it has something to do with all that big dike energy it exudes.

SHEEP!

Where Pandemic explored the grander country-wide scope of the flooding, Lowlands is interested in far more local concerns. Primarily, sheep. In the greatest tradition of farming simulators across all of board gaming, Lowlands gives you a field full of square spaces, more tile sized building options than a B&Q, and enough sheeples to fuel the spit-roasting of an actual sheep. Seriously.

I have never even come close to using all these things. Which makes the inclusion of the incase of emergency 3 sheep tiles hilariously superfluous!

The trappings of this game will be familiar to any Uwe Rosenberg fan, to the extent that he even has an “Uwe approved” badge on the box. And why not? His games are widely seen as amongst the best board games in existence so taking some inspiration from him can hardly be considered a bad idea. If that was all there was then Lowlands would not be garnering so much attention though. No, it is in where the design styles diverge from the Agricola/Caverna model that makes it interesting.

SO MANY SHEEP

The first is focus. The farming is all about the sheep, and that singular focus is hugely beneficial. Not that there’s anything wrong with the breadth of options to you in, say, Caverna. But having that one core element puts everyone on the same page with regards to what is going on and makes the game about doing one thing very well rather than exploring a multitude of somewhat independent elements. With just a glance around the table you have some idea how well someone is doing just by how many sheep are crammed into their pastures. But that doesn’t tell you everything.

I mentioned water right? The need for Lowlands’ absolute farming focus is made clear by its other major innovation: the dike. You see, sea levels are continuously rising and without a nice big dike everyone’s farm faces floods and those valuable sheep face being swept out to sea! The dike dominates the game. Both in terms of components, with its wonderfully chunky wooden blocks, and in your experience. It is a constant weight on your mind. You’ll be nervously glancing at it throughout the game and that must be near a perfect recreation of the experience of being a smallholder farmer in 19th century Holland, forever glancing at the low mound of earth between everything you own and the merciless waves.

The trick is that there is just one big dike protecting all of you, making its construction a collaborative effort. But, of course, that means you don’t have to contribute anything and can just focus entirely on your own farm! Why waste actions and resources helping everyone? These semi-cooperative elements in games always give me cause for concern. Their nature is too often one where a sore loser can intentionally tank the game. Not here.

But so far this description has been a little too woolly. Let’s get into some of the meat for context. Taking a “build dike” action moves your marker up this track, the track of COMMUNITY RESPONSIBILITY, by the number of resources contributed. At the end of every second round you check to see whether the dike holds (more dike than water) or fails (the opposite). Hold, and contributing players earn coins, which are each worth a point come game end. But the trick is that the number earned is equal to the number of (large, numbered) spaces between your marker and the player who contributed least! Which is both an incredibly effective game mechanic and a very astute social commentary on the rewards of your labours – it’s entirely relative.

On the other hand, if the dike fails, the least helpful players will take negative flood tokens, again, determined by the number of spaces you are behind the leader. This system encourages you, even if you don’t want the dike to hold, to contribute a little bit so that you aren’t gifting the lead players tons of money, or taking too much punishment. It turns the track into a race, which can absolutely offset the cost in resources by in large.

But then something even more interesting happens. The value of everything changes. Hold, and all those sheep feel more secure and are worth more money – great for those selfish shepherds who are growing their farm while you toil on the dike. But there are also points for how much you’ve worked on the dike available, and if the dike holds these points just drift to nothing. Nobody cares about the dike unless it fails! At which point you earn big points for contributing while the price of sheep slips downwards. Not only is this thematically appropriate, it encourages all players to hug the line between success and failure, keeping the game as tense as a lamb on Sunday.

Especially with the storm coming.

Too Many sheep!?

The final phase of the game is a great storm surge that might yet blow the dike open entirely. It is at this point, and this point only, that those flood tokens, weaknesses in your stretch of the dike, come into effect. If the dike fails at game end, then it really fails, and players have to discard those point scoring sheep, one for every flood token they have collected. But if the dike holds, then all those flood tokens, all those “punishments”, they are simply discarded with no effect!

The entire game hinges on this moment. You stare at your collection of sheep, you stare at your opponent’s, you look at the dike and how much everyone has contributed, and you agonise over where you apply your actions to best bring down your opponent and raise yourself up, without knowing exactly how the dike will go. Even if you do, it is impractical to math out the resulting impact and so the game sits on a knife edge for the entirety of the second half!

That alone is reason enough to play. But that’s only one of the game’s mechanics. You can buy and sell sheep to a constrained market which, naturally, presents great opportunities and risks given their changing value and your exposure to flooding. The action selection, using workers of varying strengths and little efficiency boosting assistants is interesting and difficult, even if it is hard to avoid spending quite a lot of those actions gathering resources.

How to build your farm is an accessible but enjoyable puzzle. You need to keep your sheep contained within the fences, and you want to leave space for the breeding frenzy at the end of each round where, if you’ve played your fencing right, your herd will gain half as many sheep again. But you don’t want to neglect the many and varied buildings that offer impressive combos and opportunities for particular strategies. When you do choose to build the dike, you are even forced to invite another player along to help, a choice fraught with implications and potential for unexpected outcomes.

Lowlands comes into a space dominated by Uwe Rosenberg designs and casually sweeps them aside to create a space all of its own. It has much of the familiar, especially in the building powers and board management, but a specific focus and unpredictability that keeps you constantly adapting and hovering about 3 inches past the edge of your seat. If I have any criticism it’s that the ingenious interactive elements might not hold up as well with 2 as with 3 or 4, and that I sometimes wish the value of everything shifted even more dynamically. But the clear focus and quick play time more than makes up for that.

Rating: Ewe Want It

Our copy of Lowlands was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can pick up a copy for £64.99 RRP from your local hobby store.