Cornwall Review

Summer is a time for holidays, unless you’re a board game reviewer, and that puts me in mind of sunny days in the south of France. However, post-Brexit Britain is a different country than it was and we must ask ourselves whether it is really right for an upstanding member of Britain to be showing appreciation for products of the old enemy? So I guess it’s no more baguettes, Bousin or, most tragically of all, Carcassonne. But what does someone looking to be a good patriotic Britain do now for holidays and tile-laying games? Well don’t worry, perhaps Cornwall can satisfy both of those requirements.

Cornwall is a tile-laying game featuring the rugged landscapes of Cornish hills and fields, forest and villages, also swamps but don’t let that spoil the majesty of it. If you’ve ever played Carcassonne you pretty much know what’s going on here. But Cornwall is a tile laying game of Britain, for Britain. It’s as British as the royal family, and not least because they both come from Germany.

We’ll just skip past the first player rules (the last person to visit England…) that makes me question if they ever intended to release it over here and focus instead on how the game works. So, just like Carcassonne you’ll draw a tile from the stack, add it to the growing landscape and decide whether to put some meeples on it, and then score any completed regions. I did say it was similar to Carcassonne right? I mean just look at the score track.

Oh no, see it’s different because this track only goes up to 40 and it winds in a slightly different way, and you see how the stones are white? Completely. Different.

Keeping Score

This is kind of the feeling that pervades the game. Everything is a slight twist on how Carcassonne did things. The tiles are weird 3 hex shapes, you have some tall and fat meeples to go with your normal chaps. There are abbeys, the villages are like small cities in that they are worth more points than the other types of regions, and you’ll have that same fear of running out of meeples. So what is really different?

The first is the clink of cardboard cash. Cornwall adds a little bit of resource management to the tried and tested tile-laying mechanics. Rather than requiring you to always extend previous features, here you need only extend one, the other hexes can close off old regions if need be, but the game rewards you for extending multiple regions at once by giving you coins. Just like in real nature. I join up mountain to mountain, and field to field, out pops a coin for my coffers.

You’ll need coins to make your meeple workforce do just about anything. I don’t know if it was the designer’s intention to pass comment on the Cornish attitude towards work, but here you’ll need to bribe your meeples to come out of the “Old Pub” after a region they were in scores. Yes, that is a pub tile.

You’ll also need coins to play workers to the board. Placing one, in one of the 3 hexes on a tile, is free. But placing more costs a coin each, and if, for whatever reason, you decide you want to place a meeple in a region that already has some meeples in it, then you’ll have to pay an extra coin per meeple that is already in the area. Not that you want to try and steal my region or anything! Ha ha ha! Ha?

So there’s another difference. Rather than Carcassonne’s passive aggressive manoeuvring to get in on someone’s area, Cornwall just let’s you turn up on their door step with someone taller or fatter and say, yep, this is mine now. The tall thin meeples are worth two of your normal meeples when grabbing an area, the massive round meeples are worth 3. And generally it’s only the player with the most in an area that gets to score it. The exception being flags: just like in actual Cornwall, you’ll occasionally come across Cornish flags in the forests or fields and that makes that whole place better (also worth more points!) Coming second in a region with a flag will get you a few points too and the temptation to go after first place.

Lost in translation?

So far from my description you’re probably wondering what difference any of this makes but the collection of relatively small tweaks has actually created something with a different feel. Carcassonne presents you with a question each round: where is the best place for my tile? I always feel like there is a correct answer to that question, even if it’ not always obvious, and that the player who can best see those moves will win. Cornwall instead offers you multiple best answers because of the need to maintain your economy.

When is it best to spend your coins to fight for a big scoring region? Is it worth grabbing that immediate three points for an abbey or investing in a region, or both? You’ll sometimes choose to make tile placements that benefit your opponent’s because it will give you coins. Or you’ll sacrifice coins to try and block off or complete an opponent’s region by dropping a cottage in there, no region being complete without a cottage as I’m sure you know. You’re trying to work out what your future needs might be, especially since you’ll only be given so many opportunities to earn said cash.

That greater focus on area control also makes it much more directly interactive and the more players you have the better this gets. Cornwall definitely plays better with more than 2. There is still the ‘luck of the draw’ issue that some people have with Carcassonne but the fact that you can easily get this played in 20 minutes means it gets away with it in my eyes.

I prefer Carcassonne’s puzzle. Like English wine, Cornwall doesn’t offer the complexity or depth of its French cousin. Abbeys are a perfect example: in Carcassonne you are tasked with trying to surround them with other tiles, a not insubstantial challenge, but you are rewarded for doing so. Cornwall just gives you a couple of points for placing a meeple on them. Yet what it does offer is a much simpler, faster game. For fans of Carcassonne this is probably not what you are looking for. But for families with younger kids who aren’t going to get the over-complex farmer rules, or the subtlety of capturing another player’s city, this might be a much better starter point. In my experience, the desire to find the best move does slow down Carcassonne, whereas Cornwall fits that filler category well. It makes for a nice refresher between long meaty games. But it’s not going to change your world.

 

Rating: Old Pub Time

 

Cornwall was provided to us for review by Coiledspring Games.