Door 18

Tableau building is awesome! 😍 I love the arc these kinds of games have: you start out with basically nothing, and as the game goes on you expand and improve your tableau of components, which adds to the possibilities you have, the quality/quantity of actions at your disposal, or it gives you a bunch of victory points. I find tableau building games inherently replayable - every time your tableau will be different and you will be wondering what kind of things you will have the next time around. 🥰

Our biggest favorites using this mechanic are Terraforming Mars and Everdell, but we felt like playing and highlighting something quicker, so we chose 🐾 Meadow! Meadow is incredibly beautiful, easily one of the best looking games in our collection, and it offers relaxing yet deeply engaging gameplay.

The biggest twist this game does to tableau-building is how you don’t just add stuff to your display but also have to sacrifice certain icons, so your possibilities are ever changing. Cards you can play have icon requirements - you can only play them if you have those already in your tableau. After placing the card it will cover some symbol(s) so you really have to plan carefully not to ruin some future possibilities for yourself. The way the game works, you always have plans for multiple turns in advance, and it can be difficult not to forget what you were gunning for. 😄 But this is what makes it so engaging - you are always on the lookout for interesting new cards, and always re-evaluating actions you might take.

Add to this a really clever action selection with a few different tokens that limit which cards you can pick from the open ones, and you have yourself a real brain-burner of a game. It needs a lot more brain power than you might expect. 😅