Waterfall Park

• Designer: Karsten Hartwig
• Publisher: Repos
• Players: 3-5
• Age: 14+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Welcome to Waterfall Park. The goal of the game is to trade and exchange attractions to build the biggest amusement park in the world. The particularity of this park is that it is built vertically on huge towers in the middle of the ocean.

The board goes on the table and the deck of 78 location cards is shuffled.  The attraction tiles are shuffled and placed face down near the board.  Each tile has a number on it telling you the maximum size of that type of attraction, and there are enough tiles of each to form two complete max sized attractions.  Players take the store bases in their color and take 5 coins to start with.

The game is played in 4 rounds, each with 4 phases: Preparation,  Exchange, Construction, Income.

Preparation – based on the player aid, each player is dealt a number of Location cards, and then 2 are discarded back to the deck.  When everyone has chosen their cards, they reveal their cards and mark those spaces on the board with their colored plastic bases.  Next, each player is dealt a number of Attraction tiles as shown on the player aid

Exchange – all players reveal the tiles they were dealt and there is now free-form negotiation.  Pretty much anything can be traded (locations on the board, attraction tiles, ownership of attraction tiles, coins).  Once agreed, deals happen immediately, though future promises are NOT binding.  This phase continues until every says they are done.

Construction – All players can place any attraction tiles they own on to the board, but no one is obligated to place any.  You can only place them on locations where you have a base already placed.  The maximum size of an attraction is shown on the tiles themselves. Attractions that are adjacent but owned by different players are separate attractions.    Once a tile is placed, it can never be moved on the board, but again, ownership can transfer in the exchange phase.

Income – All you constructed tiles (i.e. those placed on the board) give income based on the size of the attraction.  There are helpful charts on the top left of the board to tell you how much you make based on the size of the attraction and whether it is complete or not.  Income is announced aloud and then coins are to be taken and then placed facedown.

Repeat this four times. There is no end game scoring. Coins are revealed at the end of the game. The player with the most money at the end of Round 4 is the winner, ties broken in favor of the most Attraction tiles on the board.

My thoughts on the game

If you have felt the description above sounded familiar, it’s because this game is the spiritual successor to Chinatown; though Waterfall Park is apparently meant to be lighter and shorter in duration.  For me, this is a good thing as Chinatown was maybe a bit too harsh for my tastes – and some would contend that it is possibly calculable in the endgame.  That being said, Chinatown is felt by many to be the essential negotiation game; and it has been mostly out of print in recent years.  The original was put out by Alea in 1999, and then there was a small print run done by Z-man in 2014 – reviewed here by myself: https://opinionatedgamers.com/2014/07/23/dale-yu-review-of-chinatown/

This new game offers a different board layout – which limits the number of regions for 5 down to 2 – and also arranges the spaces in a pseudo-hex layout which gives a lot more adjacency to each space.  The game is also made shorter by only having four rounds instead of six.  The other change I noticed is that there is no longer scarcity for the tiles as there are now two full sets of the tile values for each type.  

Early in the game, most players try to set up their locations on the board.  You get a hand of cards, and you try to get cards that are in proximity to each other. After all, you’ll need a block of adjacent spaces in order to build a large or hopefully complete business.  I’d also try to focus on locations in the interior of the two areas as these spaces will have 6 possible adjacencies while the tiles on the exterior may have as few as 3 possible adjacencies.  This will make it easier to find tiles that group together nicely.  And, the larger the business, the more money you’ll make!  Later in the game, you’ll also likely work to find spaces that are close to your opponent’s spaces as they might be great negotiation tools – as your opponents may need those spaces to finish off their own attractions.

While businesses that are smaller than that number also generate income, only complete businesses generate far greater incomes. And as one would expect, the greater the business number, the greater the potential profit to be earned.  For instance, the theater is worth 12 coins if all five tiles are placed contiguously. The same five tiles placed non-contiguously would earn only $50,000… 

I know that not everyone agrees with me, but I think that the game is still somewhat calculable – as you near the final round, you can see how much a specific space will benefit someone (in terms of increased income), and this gives a calculable value to a trade.  The math can get a bit convoluted (sometimes you have to calculate the advantage for a trade and then multiply it by the number of rounds that it will pay off, etc) but you should be able to work it out.  

Negotiation feels different in Waterfall Park – but neither in a good nor bad way – just different.  In one way there is less impetus to trade for a specific tile as there are more of each type available – thus, it’s more likely that you’ll find the tile you’re looking for in a later round.  But on the other hand, there are only four rounds in the game now, so if you don’t trade for that bowling alley now – you might not have enough chances to get it.  These competing dynamics work against each other to both slow and accelerate trading.  Trying to convince someone that they need to make a trade now rather than waiting is definitely a skill to practice for Waterfall Park. 

There is also a certain art to deciding which tiles to place each round. Once you play a tile, it’s stuck on the board forever, so you need to be sure you want to commit to the location for the rest of the game.  You also possibly announce your strategy to your opponents, thus raising the trade value for that type of attraction in future negotiations… 

That being said, you only generate income from tiles played to the board, so if you hold on to them, you lose that income potential.  In the original version, the rules specify a start player for the round and say that, if anyone asks, this phase be done in turn order.  There is no start player so there is no way to compel order in this phase. There can now be a little bit of a standoff if players try to wait each other out to see who is going to place what tile in which location.  If this becomes an issue, you’ll have to come up with some way to solve the issue as the rules no longer provide you a way to do so.

The art is bright and cartoony – it is generally pleasing to the eye.  I feel that the plastic bases make it easy to distinguish ownership of the spaces; though near the end of the game, the board is a visual cacophony of colors, tiles, and background art.

Are these changes all better?  I mean, it all depends on how you like your negotiation games.  In the original game, there were a lot of harsh outcomes if you drew poorly or couldn’t work a deal to get that necessary space.  Here, some of that tension is lost, but I think you get the feeling that you can get more accomplished, and for me, this makes me more willing to do deals.  For me, I also appreciate that the reduced scarcity of tiles makes the game more playable at higher player counts as it is less likely that bad luck in drawing will hose you – this is something that I seem to remember happening to at least one player in every 5p game of Chinatown.  And as I mentioned above, I dislike the lack of a turn order to the Placement phase if it becomes necessary.

For me, I prefer the new version.  I’m honestly not as serious a gamer as I used to be.  While I definitely enjoy games with difficult decisions, I’m no longer looking for a cutthroat experience, one where I have to be looking to maximize every single move.  This is a personal preference, and I know not one that is shared by all gamers.  But that’s fine – gamers now can find the version of this trading/negotiation game that they prefer.  I feel like this version is also a bit more approachable to non-serious gamers – the art is pretty, the game length is shorter and the overall game is just more forgiving.  There are more ways to succeed (and definitely fewer ways to fail).  For me, I’ll keep Waterfall Park.  Well, to be honest, I had already traded/sold all my previous versions of Chinatown, so that’s a pretty easy decision for me.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Joe Huber (1 play; 6 plays of Chinatown): I picked up Waterfall Park in no small part because of the theme; I completely missed the fact that it was a reimplementation of Chinatown.  But while I do think Waterfall Park is an improvement for me – using hex rather than square spacing and bringing the areas closer together helps the negotiations to work more smoothly – it didn’t change my general opinion of the game, and as such has moved on to my trade pile.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y, John P, Mark Jackson
• Neutral. Joe H.
• Not for me…