Reykholt Review

Reykholt is a study in human psychology, and an exploration of the impact of unfettered capitalism on those caught within its grip. A relentless demand is created by an unending turnover of tourists but they will never be satisfied by what you’ve delivered. They always crave the new, the next type of vegetable, and as you advance your bottle of wine scoring marker along the row of tables lining the board that craving only grows. I’ve seen one tomato before, I want two. Growth is the only thing that matters. You build more greenhouses, you plant and harvest and plant and harvest always chasing a moving target until you can no longer keep up, throwing your greenhouses, the life-blood of your business, away to just crawl one more table along the line until you’re left with nothing. Nothing! And you stare your own defeat in the eyes. The game, finished.

Reykholt

Players: 1-4
Time: 30-60 mins
Designer: Uwe Rosenberg
Artist: Klemens FranzLukas Siegmon
Publisher: Frosted Games


Let us take a step back. Reykholt is a game about growing vegetables in Iceland. You know it’s Iceland because it’s so cold even the carrots need greenhouses. But you start without even a shard of glass to hand. Take the opportunity now to throw all the stones you can. So it is off to the main board to precure yourself one. And, while you’re at it, better get some veg to plant too.

Reykholt board

Well now it looks like we have got ourselves a worker placement game… about farming… why yes that is Uwe Rosenberg’s name on the box. How!? How, you might wonder, can a designer known for, at present count, 8 worker placement games, possibly keep things fresh? Astonishingly he does. And there are two reasons why this one stands out from most other games in the genre.

The first is the objective: deliver a very specific combination of vegetables in a very specific order. Everyone is trying to do exactly the same thing, as far from a point salad as you can possibly get. And that is perfect for a classical worker placement game – the exclusion of other players from the actions you choose forces them to diversify their approach. To deal with their second, or even third, pick. The array of spots on the main board supports this. There are really only 4 or 5 actions, but multiple spaces that give that result to various degrees, costs or variations. For example, there is a ‘Take one greenhouse’ spot, and also a ‘Take a tomato AND a greenhouse, of specific sizes’, or a ‘Discard one vegetable to gain a greenhouse or seed a bunch’. You can definitely gain a greenhouse each turn, but will you have the size you want, or can you afford the costs?

Reykholt Greenhouse

The second major reason is the economy. Your very local, personal economy. While you have your standard gain one tomato type of spots on the main board, you are a farmer! So you’ll take that tomato and you’ll do a plant action to place it into one of your greenhouses, at which point the entire greenhouse spontaneously fills with them! One tomato makes quite a few seeds after all. Suddenly your farm is filled with potential but nothing about farming in Iceland is easy. Harvesting one or two spots from amongst your greenhouses is as much effort as planting them was, and you’ll have to harvest a greenhouse multiple times before you’ve emptied it to plant again. At the end of each round everyone gets a bonus harvest action from each greenhouse, but it’s going to take a while for that to build up.

Everything in Reykholt takes a while. It feels like a tremendous effort to get even your first greenhouse planted – plausibly you won’t even manage this in the first round! With only 3 workers, and so many bits to manage, and the constant pressure of the tourist track, this is a game that absolutely rewards careful forward planning. But there are also opportunities for big, highly efficient actions. There are spaces that let you plant in all of your greenhouses, but that requires you have the empty greenhouses and the right mix of veg on hand to plant with. Coordinate all this and you’ll feel like a genius.

Reykholt track

The way the demands ramp up as the game goes on is fascinating. One veg of each type is easy. So easy that you might accidentally short your engine before it gets going. The mid game running of your developing engine will get you through the two and three veg tables without too much difficulty but before you know it you’re slamming into the 4s and 5s and there is just no way to produce every one of those veg types in that quantity and at that speed. What are you going to do? The game builds relentlessly to this impossible question and it makes for an great climax.

There are action spaces that let you ditch greenhouses to move forward, fantastic! You think. But then you need to be in exactly the right spot at the end of your previous turn to make use of those. The fight to crawl one space further is unlike any other Euro game I think I’ve played, thanks to the specificity of the task in front of you. The one issue is that you can see how close everyone else is too. With but a bit of calculation, you might know the winner already, unless you can interfere on the worker placement board.

Reykholt veg

Like the tourists we board gamers forever crave the new. We’ve seen that before, it’s no longer good enough. Designers are the gardeners, contorting and twisting to create something to grab our attention. Reykholt offers us the same vegetables we’ve seen before, but in a cunningly different way. And then it says, oh, you liked this? Why not try it with this tweak here? Suddenly there is a menu of ways to play, card set after card set that can be slotted in, each subtly changing the dynamic of the game. There is so much to explore, even a so-called story mode.

Reykholt may not be quite as excellent as Uwe’s magnum opus, A Feast for Odin, but what games are? It is still an extremely solid game, far more interesting than most worker placement games, and a fair bit more comprehensible than Uwe’s typically sprawling behemoths. This is Uwe at his most accessible.

Rating: 6 Lettuces


Our copy of Reykholt was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can get a copy for £57.99 RRP from your local hobby store.

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