Lighting a path through the fog

🏮 Last Lantern is a co-operative tile-laying game - I don't think we see enough of those!

The biggest novelty of the game is a bit of a no-communication 🗣️ twist: Each round players use their lantern wheels to secretly choose a pair of things (a polyomino tile and a familiar meeple) to use. If you pick the same pair, you have to divide them between you, which is really suboptimal. (To be fair you can talk before and after this drafting phase, so you can discuss what you need to game the system a bit - but accidents often happen 😄).

The game board depicts a grid that you will have to fill up - thematically to find a path through the thick supernatural fog that descended upon our home. The grid is divided into paths for each player, a few columns with some of them shared across adjacent players.

The challenge of the game is that you don't want to proceed too fast on your path: 👉Each time a polyomino reaches the row of a lantern, you have to draw fireflies out of a bag and place them on each empty space in your path-grid. So you have to effectively fill up squares, which is of course made hard by the drafting. By the way you lose if you put too many black fireflies 🦗 on your path 😨 - so beware. 

Additionally, unclaimed tiles go on a track each round, adding black fireflies into the bag and getting you closer to defeat. To help you out, you can use the familiar meeples to claim back lost tiles, re-infuse the bag with yellow fireflies or give you bonus tiles to fill up empty squares. Reach the end of the path and survive the final flurry of fireflies and you win! 😉

There are additional modules you can add too, like having to also watch for the flowers on tiles, or glowy mushroom tiles that punish you if you don't pick them, or special colored fireflies with new penalties upon drawing them, and so on. I feel like these are a must to add some spice into the game.

To be honest the main twist of the game of secretly choosing tiles is the part I like the least. 😶 If you pick the same more than 1-2 times, it quickly spells doom. Otherwise if you are looking for a quick and light tile-layer, check out Last Lantern.