Reef Review
Wouldn’t it be great if we could just grow back the coral reef? Wipe away the devastation wrought by man and as simple as plopping down some colourful blocks have a bourgeoning underwater garden once more. Sadly it’s not quite so simple in the real world, so we’ll just have to play Reef instead. At least these lumps of coral are acid proof. I mean, they’ve gotta be child proof and that’s basically the same thing.
Players: 2-4
Time: 30-45 mins
Ages: 8+
Designer: Emerson Matsuuchi
Artist: Chris Quilliams
Publisher: Next Move Games
I wouldn’t recommend studying the theme of Reef too closely. It is more of an artistic description than a theme. As players you are… the reef itself? Growing and expanding to earn points in the annual reef of the year awards. No, Reef is an abstract through and through, but that should be expected as it is what publisher Next Move (an imprint of Plan B) is all about. Their first game was Azul, this is their second. That’s quite the standard to live up to!
Things start off pretty well! We have here all new pretty, weighty plastic pieces for each type of coral. Pieces that feel good in the hand, are easily distinguished by colour blind players and stack really, really well.
Which is good, because that’s what you’ll be doing! Your reef will grow outwards and upwards according to the whims of fate and your personal attempts to corral that coral into beneficial structures that will score you points. All is driven by cards.
Playing Reef is as simple as taking or playing a card. Take from the little market, and add to your hand. By paying a point you can take the (face up) top of deck card but that point then goes on a market card to be taken by another player. It’s a very neat solution to the “can I take from the top of the deck” question. And the fact that I’m interested in such questions says a lot about me…
The real game though is in the playing. Dropping a card gives you two things: new pieces of coral sprouting spontaneously from your reef, and an opportunity to score points from the arrangement of coloured pieces across your player board. Perhaps 4 points for a line of 3 adjacent purples, or 5 points for every yellow at the top of a stack 4 pieces high. The thing is, the pieces you gain from the top of the card are never what you score for on the bottom.
There you have your central puzzle! The game forces you to plan multiple turns ahead, to carefully choose cards that will feed the pieces you need into big scoring opportunities. You are constantly adapting as new cards appear, realising that, oh, if I play that one first it will let me double my scoring from this card, and that is neat. The challenge is often that new pieces must go out before you score, restricting where you can place if you don’t want to cover up the scoring patterns, inevitably forcing you into compromises.
When this all works it is great! The initial turns are spent building up, rarely scoring, eventually triggering the odd card. Then your reef reaches a critical mass and you’re scoring from it constantly! Chaining together card plays and feeling like the best… reefer in the sea.
But this epic game end is rather dependent on how the cards come out of the deck. Perhaps more likely you will be struggling to make your reef fit the demands of the cards available. It’s a different challenge, but one not quite as satisfying. It loses that sense of reward for constructing something cleverly across the entire game. And without that arc the game just feels that much flatter. Less great barrier reef and more aquarium display. A very good aquarium display, don’t get me wrong. But it’s just not quite the same.
The limited player interaction further compounds this sense of flatness. There is opportunity for hate drafting within the market and that is naturally a good thing, especially with the VP investment required to get a card early. It’s interesting. But too much hate drafting drives the game away from the combotastic end game where it fires into life. Yet no such behaviour leaves it a very solitary affair and that’s not so good either.
Reef is a perfectly solid game. A mathematically well constructed game. But it can’t consistently generate the emergent excitement it needs to wow players, leaving it feeling merely ok.
Rating: Breef
Our copy of Reef was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can pick up a copy for £36.99 RRP from your local hobby store.
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