Topiary Review

Off to the park to see the Topiary! What better way to enjoy a sunny bank holiday? But it seems others have had the same idea – worse! They’ve got there before you and snagged the best spot! You know, the one where you can see all the T-Rex bushes. Well that’s not on. The only sensible course of action is to find some giant bush and plonk right in front of them to ruin their view. Hah! Classic day at the park.

Players: 2-4
Time: 15-30 min
Age: 10+
Designer: Danny Devine
Artist: Danny Devine, Jeff Oglesby
Publisher: Fever Games, Renegade Games

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Topiary is another smaller boxed game from Renegade Games, who seem to be doing rather well for themselves of late, with Castell and Ex Libris and Altiplano to their name. Those are just the ones I’ve covered on the blog, too! Those were three very attractive games to look at too, but Topiary is a little… blander, shall we say?

Perhaps I’m just not a hedge connoisseur  (or should that be… conifer?) Topiary looks functional. And to be fair, there’s not much room in the design for artistic flair. You need to be able to immediately distinguish the different shapes of hedge, and while the number on a tile will tell you the size, the artwork is also scaled to match. A nice touch. An even nicer touch are the meeples which, let’s be honest, could have just been standard meeples but say one thing for Renegade, say they’ll put some flair in!

The Topiary meeples are not only an exciting variety of different shapes (I personally always do star jumps when viewing hedges) the green meeple is in a wheelchair. Representation is a big topic in board gaming right now and that usually focuses on issues of gender or race. Including disabled characters in your game is an element of this that doesn’t get as much focus but is every bit as important. For Renegade to have the awareness to include a custom wheelchair-bound meeple shows just how far ahead of the curve they are.

The grass is always greener

Topiary is, like gardening, a gentle puzzle of observation, timing, and viciously screwing over your neighbours. You find yourself on the edge of a 5×5 grid of tiles and it’s your challenge to find the best spots to sit and observe this garden. Sadly, until you pick a spot you just won’t know what the view is like. The tiles all start face down or, I guess, lawn side up. Then players choose an empty spot, at the end one of the rows, columns or a diagonal, to look along. They then swap one of the face down tiles in the line they are looking down for a bush in their hand.

Talk about simple, but quite smart too. The three tiles in hand give you a reasonable number of options and you can use the tile you just picked up if by chance it was the perfect fit, giving a touch of that gambling thrill. Allowing you to place meeples looking along the diagonal lines also opens up a lot more options than the classical row/column structure this game’s layout suggests. That leaves a good amount of room for spotting good positions and plays.

Of course, to identify those great spots, it’s useful to know how you score. Refreshingly, it’s just like how you score parks in real life. You add up the numbers on all the bushes you can see in each line your meeples are looking down, with some bonus points for matching shapes. The “can see” is an important clarifier though, as the tall, high-numbered, plants block your view of anything smaller. This is where you can get mean.

Especially early on, when there aren’t any positive opportunities available, ruining someone else’s day is pretty much the best you can hope for. Going first is more a curse than a blessing. This must have been designed by an individual forced out of bed for trips to the park too many times! But Topiary is not a game that wants to stick around for long and the need for points will tend to mean you’ll only get an inopportune tree air-dropped in front of you if that also helps the player doing it (hard to feel too annoyed at that) or if they really have nothing better to do and then, well, you took the risk didn’t you? Should have played it safe and stayed in the coffee shop.

As I say, Topiary is a short game so you won’t hold grudges for too long. In 4 player games you will literally only get 5 turns. By the time you get started, the game is over and you’re adding up the scores, a fairly involved and painful process that can take almost as long as playing the game. Fortunately, those limited turns are rather engaging. Searching the grid for the best move given your hand of tiles, evaluating the risk of being screwed and whether to take a chance on getting a lucky pick up. As I said before, having the diagonals to consider makes a potentially simple puzzle much more interesting.

Topiary reminds me alot of Hand of the King, possibly because of the grid system and the steadily retracting options. But also because it presents a perfectly solid puzzle, featuring a few amusing moments, without having that “ooo! I really want to play that again!” spark. In Topiary, the main reason for that has got to be how long it takes to add up the scores at the end. If anything is going to ruin your day at the park, it’s going to be a maths test at the gate. Put it this way, in many ways Topiary is competing for the same spot in your collection as Azul. And I can’t think why you would choose this instead.

 

Rating: Mid-iary

 

Our copy of Topiary was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can pick up a copy for £28.99 RRP, from your local hobby store.