Welcome to the wilderness of North America! Breathtaking mountain views and spectacular geysers await you. Vast forests and prairie provide habitats for native animals. Your task is to group animals of the same species together in families as large as possible. But large families are only half the battle: to score a lot of points, they also need access to watering holes and must avoid bad weather.
A turn comprises two simple steps: First, one player chooses a feature (species or watering hole) and a terrain requirement from a limited selection. Then, each player must place one of their tokens showing that feature onto one of their park spaces obeying that terrain requirement. What seems no trouble at first grows more and more challenging and exciting as the available spaces become fewer and fewer. But it’s not only the choices of your fellow players that can disrupt your plans. There are also unpredictable weather tokens that you must take into account.
After five rounds, the game ends. Then you score your most valuable family of each species and the terrains you completely populated.
Caldera Park is an interactive puzzle-game that achieves a perfect balance between strategic planning and luck. This, and its accessible ruleset, make it a great next step for anyone who enjoyed Savannah Park.
—description from the publisher
- Sequel to excellent Savannah Park
- Same core idea with improvements
- Added flexibility with location restrictions
- Disaster tiles add tension
- Huge improvement over predecessor
- Enjoyable with groups
- nature conservancy
- animals
- geothermal
- environment
- Savannah Park
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- This extra twist of uh extra objectives to chase after if you build these is such a cool leveling up for the game
- This game is very mean-spirited oh the aggressive moves you can make really messing with your opponent
- This game is freaking brilliant
- This core idea is so brilliant one of the coolest new ideas I've seen in worker placement in years
- This is one of the best card drafting closed hand card drafting games of all time
- I would play this over seven wonders quite frankly because it adds so much depth and variety and control
- This game blew me and Jen away
- Jeffrey CCH might before too long make it into my top 10 favorite designers
- They have done the ultimate spinning gears game
- This is going to make a lot of top 10 of the years for 2024 when it comes out later this year