Designed by Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer, Caldera Park is a standalone sequel to the designers' earlier game Savannah Park (Deep Print/Pegasus Spiele).
This is a tile-laying game where the 1-4 players will be placing tiles depicting one or more animals on the different terrain hexes on their individual boards. In that regard, it has thematic similarities to 2022 Spiel des Jahres award winner Cascadia (AEG/Flatout Games). Players have to place weather tiles out on their boards too and these each limit which animals can be adjacent to them. So placement in Caldera Park becomes an optimisation puzzle. Players take turns choosing and dictating instructions for the terrain at which you should place particular animals but you only have to comply if you have that option available to you: if you're instructed to place a bison in a mountain hex and you have no bison available to you this turn, then you get to place out any animal; likewise if you have no terrain hexes that meet the requirement. Ultimately you'll score for completely covering each terrain type and for 'families' of animals (number of each type contiguous to each other) multiplied by the number of water holes in the terrain.
Caldera Park is attractively presented, with art by Annika Heller, and Deep Print Games and Pegasus Spiele have even included illustrated tuck boxes for each players' set of hex tiles. Tho' it's not of course a roll & write game, it has the same puzzle and push-your-luck vibe typified by many roll & writes. There's a solitaire mode and you can play with up to four but we've especially enjoyed Caldera Park as a two-player game, playable in around 30 minutes. At this player count, more competitive players can maintain a weather eye on their opponent's board and more readily take account of their state of play in making choices over which fauna and terrain combination to impose...
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