Reykholt

Reykholt is a relatively recent Uwe game that did not receive lukewarm-to-bad reviews by accident. To me, it mostly works as a warning of how easily Hallertau could have gone wrong without its cards: what remains here is dry worker placement with farming laid over it, as though a failed prototype slipped out of a drawer.

Each round, I place my three workers to acquire and sow fields, harvest, and eventually sell my vegetables to tourists. The aim is to meet a demand track that keeps rising, so there is a straightforward pressure to arrange my production before the requirements outpace me.

The supposed variety from game to game comes from a set of special cards. But in my experience, those cards are either uninteresting or broken, meaning that the game’s one real source of variation also manages to be its most suspicious part. Interaction is mostly about who gets to the available worker-placement actions first, without anything that gives the process much particular tension.

I can tolerate it for one game, mostly because it does not last long. I might even sit down for a second just to see the story mode—yes, apparently everyone is copying Pfister. But I am still left with the feeling that the master sold off one of his failed prototypes while developing Hallertau. At least it has the odd joke that nearly everyone ends in a tie: a polite, almost ceremonial confirmation that nobody won all that much.