Adventures on a tropical island

One of our favorite flip&write games is Trails of Tucana. It’s a simple concept, yet awesome fun. So when I heard Tucana Builders was coming to SPIEL23, I was immediately intrigued! 😊 After playing it now, I have to say it’s another great gateway game! It’s in a similar vein as Trails of Tucana, as you are trying to connect things with roads, but it also differs in some ways.

Tucana Builders kind of works like a flip&write: Each turn you flip a card and every player has to build on a terrain of that type. However instead of writing, you have tile-laying. (I guess you could call it a flip&lay? 😄). You will flip through the 12-card deck, do a scoring, then reshuffle to flip 12 cards again in the (final) second round, then score again to see who wins. 🏆

So what are we doing in this game? 🧐 During setup you draw cards to place 6 colored huts plus 6 starting road tiles on your player board. As cards are flipped from the deck, you draw a tile and have to place it on the depicted terrain type. Every tile shows either a road and an animal, or a road with an intersection. The primary goal is to connect blue monkeys to blue huts, yellow cougars to yellow huts and red snakes to red huts; additionally there are also tucans that count as a wild color!

While you cleverly place tiles to make roads that connect these animals to their corresponding huts, you also try to avoid building dead-ends, so you can have better connections and thus more points. Which is not easy to do! ☝️ Especially as there are additionally 2 random public objectives cards each game that you can race for. To help you, you do have a card that you can flip once each round to enable you to place your tile anywhere. 🃏

I think this is a great little puzzle that is highly replayable thanks to the setup cards and objectives, and it looks amazing on the table! 🤩 I did find the board a bit hard to read at first, as the terrain symbols are really bright and colorful too, but we got used to it after a while. Deciding where to place tiles each turn is a fun and crunchy decision, and the tiles lend the game tactility that Trails of Tucana otherwise lacks. 😊