The Glade

• Designer: Richard Breese
• Publisher: R&D Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 60 minutes
• Played with copy purchased at Spiel 2023 from the publisher

It’s summer time, and amid the forest lies the glade.  In The Glade, you fill your personal forest board with sets of forest tiles (played from your tile rack) that feature creatures, leaves, and forest fruits. Create sets of three tiles to place one of your toadstool counters onto the central glade board. Complete a set of four tiles to add a toadstool to your store. Claim toadstool counters from the glade for your store by playing matching forest tiles. Play toadstool counters into enclosures in your forest to create extra actions. When one player has played all twelve of their toadstool counters or when all the forest tiles have been drawn from the bag, the player with the most points wins. After playing the basic game, progress to the “matching” game in which you also match your forest tiles to the creatures, leaves, or forest fruits on your forest board.

There are 128 tiles in the game, each with one of 4 large creatures (hedgehog, mouse, squirrel, toad), one of 4 fruits (acorn, blackberry, hazelnut, mushroom), one of 4 leaves (beech, horse chestnut, maple, and oak).   It will take a while to grok how to make a set of tiles; a set is 1-4 tiles that have one shared identical characteristic, and then the other characteristics are either all the same or all different.

Each player gets their own forest board and the 12 toadstool counters in their color.  8 tiles are drawn at random and placed on their tile rack.  The glade board is placed in the center of the table.  Now, going around the table, players take turns – where they take one of two possible actions: place tiles or claim a toadstool.  Extra actions may then be taken if the player has toadstools in their store area.

Place tiles: You can place 1-4 tiles from your rack, but they must all be placed in a line horizontally or vertically on your forest board.  The tiles placed must form a set with themselves as well as any other tiles they are orthogonally adjacent to.  Your first set must be placed using the central square.  Later sets can be placed anywhere on your board; though the rules recommend connecting them to previously placed tiles.  There is a penalty at the end the game for unconnected sets.

If you make a set of 3 tiles, identify the fourth tile that would complete the set, then remove the leftmost toadstool from your side of the glade board and place it on the space which has the characteristics of the missing fourth tile.  If there is one shared characteristic, use the 1 toadstool side of the tile, if the set has 2 shared characteristics, use the 2 toadstool side.  If there is a toadstool already on that space of the glade board, replace the previous piece – giving it to its owner who places it to the left of their board into their store.

If you make a set of 4, you instead take a toadstool from the board or your supply and place it in your store; again using the 1 toadstool side if there is 1 shared characteristic and using the 2 toadstool side if there are 2 shared characteristics.

Claim a toadstool:  If you have a tile on your rack that matches that characteristics of any toadstool occupied space on the Glade board, take the toadstool counter from the matching space and then place it in your store and then place your tile on the players board to finish the set; if you cannot legally finish the set of 4, then place it anywhere on the board that is legal.  If this placement causes a new set to form, the owner of the board then gets to place a toadstool as usual.

Extra actions: if you are able to form an enclosure; which is a single space which is bordered on all four orthogonal edges by tiles, you may place one of your toadstools from your store in that space, and then take an additional action (placing tiles or claiming toadstools).

The game ends at the end of a round when either at least one player has removed all the toadstools from their side of the Glade board, or when the bag does not have enough tiles to replenish a player back to 8 tiles.

Points are then calculated:

1 point for each toadstool on a square on the Glade board

1 point for each of your toadstools currently held by an opponent

2 points for each toadstool in your store

3 points for each toadstool in an enclosure on your private board

1 point for each of your double toadstool counters anywhere in play

-1 point for each group of tiles on your board which is not connected to the central square

The player with the most points wins.  Ties broken in favor of the player with the fewest toadstools on their side of the Glade board.

My thoughts on the game

I’ll admit that when I first saw the game on the stand at Spiel, I was not overly impressed as the tile art is admittedly spartan.  However, once I learned the rules to the game, I found that the simple tiles were that way to allow the players to get the needed information quickly – and this is important as you might be looking at lots of tiles on your turn.

The game is a fairly abstract affair, as players work on forming sets on the board.  One of my friends remarked that it’s like Mega Qwirkle Set Scrabble, and that analogy is actually pretty useful in trying to get your brain to wrap around the main concept.

Once you make a set, then you get to figure out where to place your toadstool counter (and on which side) – and in the first few games, this is an activity that the whole table can work on as it was surprising to me how many times players inadvertently made sets with two matching characteristics without realizing it!

It may take a game or two to get a hang for the toadstool scoring – worse because some in my group learned from an online video that uses a different order of scoring than the rulebook!  In the end, just follow the scoring rules in the rulebook… Easy?  Well, there’s a scoresheet included in the box to tabulate scores for a reason! And honestly, if you’re going to play, there is a better user-generated scoresheet to use instead:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3180733/confused-scoresheets-usage-single-and-double-toads

The other thing that I try to remember is that when it doesn’t seem like I have a great play to the board, look around to see whether it’s possible to simply claim a toadstool!  For whatever reason, I forget about this option, and I spend a lot of time trying to make a set of 3 – when I had a perfectly viable play staring me in the face… Also, don’t be afraid to play a set of 2 if you can’t do better; just try to place them in a spot that will allow you to make a set of 3 on a later turn and hopefully get that set connected to the rest of the tiles to avoid the unconnected penalty at the end of the game.  Furthermore, the enclosures can be a really great way to lock in points, and it is a worthwhile maneuver to try to set up your board to give yourself the possibility for the creation of multiple enclosures.

As you might imagine, as the game moves onwards and the board becomes crowded with tiles, turn length inevitably increases as players search the board for potential sets and then weigh their options as to which is the best set to make.  About half of the people I have played with loved the puzzly aspect of the game while the other half felt it took too long for what you got.  I have had games go into the 90 minute range so far; a little above the 60min range printed on the box.

As you have 8 tiles on your rack, there are plenty of possibilities to consider, and as each tile has four characteristics on them, you have multiple ways to arrange your tiles into sets – and this makes it harder to plan/visualize what you can do.  I usually do the obvious (for me) and arrange them by background color and then let my eyes wander across the tiles to see what matches up.  The designer has told me that the math works out in a way to guarantee that you’ll have at least one (but probably multiple) sets of 2 no matter what.   

There is an advanced matching variant included in the rules, but I’ll admit to never have tried it because the regular game is all that I would ever want.  My mind already is working overtime just figuring out how to make the “regular” sets!   For me, The Glade ends up just on the other side of enjoyable – the tendency to run into AP-heck at the end makes it last longer that I want to play this sort of game.  It’s the sort of thing that feels more like work than recreation.  Also, I feel like there is a pretty decent learning curve to the game, and I have been slow to pick up on how to best play the game.  But… I have found more than a number of people who have asked me where to buy the game after finishing, so I may be in the minority opinion on it.  I know that I’ve already found a good home for my (ex-)copy of the game, and it will get played a lot there.  For those who enjoy abstract games, I would ask you to try this one out.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Simon W: I am definitely in the group who like abstract games and I really like this design. It is typical Richard Breese – challenging, thinky – while being a lot lighter than many of his Key games. The games usually start a bit slow but work out and at the end I really feel a sense of satisfaction – especially if I can surround a few empty spaces to put tokens in and score more points. The only thing I don’t love about the game is that the rules make it sound more complicated than it is. Love it. 

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor