More thoughts on Windmill Valley

Did you know it is impossible to breed a truly black tulip? Even the darkest breed still has a distinctly purple hue. 😮

This little trivia leads nicely to today’s post: the continuation of our discussion about 🌷Windmill Valley. We already introduced the gameplay, so let’s go a bit more into some thoughts. After Dani Garcia’s previous game Barcelona the expectations were high, maybe too high even. Windmill Valley is certainly less engaging (for us at least), but it is also a different weight category entirely. It is however an awesome accessible euro with relatively short playtime and a very intriguing action selection system with the interconnected cogs. There are several actions to choose from, but all of them are simple to grasp and quick to execute. You also get to hand-pick some of your scoring conditions which I always enjoy seeing. 😌

My biggest gripe with Windmill Valley are the tulips. The action selection, most of the actions and the multi-use cards are just amazing, but everything revolves around tulips - getting bulbs and planting bulbs. You want to use different color bulbs in columns of your player board, and have the same color rows, but instead of being a restriction it kind of trivializes everything, so it’s not that interesting in the end. I’d have loved some constraints like in Sagrada, so you have another layer on top. But alas, this lighter euro has enough going on already I guess.

Another issue we ran into in our 2p games is the water level mechanic.🤔 As players open the floodgates to spin their cogs faster for their action selection, the water level rises. There is an action for lowering it, but we rarely got to use it, as the water often barely rose, and when it did we usually immediately lowered it during the same turn.

💭I still believe the combination of the beautiful colors and overall components with the interesting mechanics like the water wheel cogs will be a blast for many players. 😉 Even though we knew Windmill Valley was going to be a more accessible title, I think we subconsciously still expected something more complex, especially after Barcelona. 😅