Sweet Lands

Designer: Totsuca Chuo

Artist: Tatsuki Asano

Publisher: Uchibacoya

Players: 1-4

Time: 100-200 minutes

Sweet Lands is the next big box game from Japanese publisher Uchibacoya. Well known for their delightful wooden tokens (the sea-eeples in Aqua Garden!), they won’t disappoint here! There are over 400 wooden bits in Sweet Lands and they are adorable. Don’t let the cuteness and innocent theme fool you, it’s not your parent’s Candyland. Sweet Lands is a big meaty strategy game.

In Sweet Lands, the King has departed to the big candy store in the sky and it’s your goal to outperform your opponents and develop Sweet Lands into the best candy nation. The game has a lot of working parts.

Each player has their own player character board with a bevy of asymmetric characters to choose from. The characters dictate your starting resources, income and they have differing special abilities.

Your player board is also where you will track income for money and resources, and also store resources and unbuilt property tokens. In addition, there is another board each player has with an Industry track and a Food track. Finally each player has their own map board (one side is identical and the other sides are asymmetric).

The main board displays skill tiles which can be obtained during game play, prosperity tracks for end game scoring and the action spaces where players will choose actions to develop their personal boards.

Other game components include map tiles and 200 citizen cards.

Oh and did I mention the game comes with 449 wooden pieces?! Here are just a few.

The game play in Sweet Lands provides lots of nice choices. I’m going to summarize the play so some finer details may be missing but I hope this gives you the gist of how the game plays.

The game play in Sweet Lands has several of my favorite elements: worker placement, hand management and city building. At the start of the round players gain benefits from “support tiles” chosen the previous round or at the start of the game. Then players gain income from their income tracks and any character effects. Players draw up to 6 citizen cards.

During the action phase players can either use an action space, play a card, flip a skill token or pass. There are also a number of free actions.

Action spaces are the core mechanism, for example players can get terrain tiles to place on their map, build roads and buildings/property tokens and advance on industry or food tracks or prosperity tracks.

To play on the first available disc space of an action,the player discards a card from hand. If another player has taken the first action space, then the second disc space will cause a player to discard 2 cards etc.

Terrain tiles are placed on their matching areas of the map. They can be flipped by building roads along the edges. Property tokens can be built on flipped terrain tokens. Groups of different property tokens can form cities for scoring. As you build property tokens bonuses are earned and if you build all of one type of token you can earn VP at the end of the game. Additionally it is important to connect the ports on the board through terrain tiles as players can lose points if the ports are unconnected.

Players can also play cards by paying the cost in money. Cards have a main ability, tags which may provide bonuses for some main abilities and an automation ability. If a player pays a diamond they may tuck the card and the automation ability can be activated again later during game play.

Skill tiles can be obtained through game play. Players may flip the skill token as an action and gain its benefits. The tile will be flipped back during the clean up phase.

Finally a player may pass. Players must keep exactly one card in hand for the next round, and excess cards are discarded. Various support tiles, skills tiles and cards can have a pass effect which would take place when the player passes. These pass effects may give points or other benefits. Players also choose new support tiles for the next round and score the industry track and for cities.

The game ends after the fifth round. The winner is the player with the most points earned during the game, prosperity tracks, bonus scoring and points from Port areas on their map board. If you don’t connect your pots you may lose points.

If you like strategy games such as Terra Mystica this game may be for you.

Sweet Lands has a bit of a steep learning curve in the first game because there are a lot of choices on how to proceed in the game. I’ve only played a few games but I like trying to be efficient with resources, deciding which end game point to pursue, how best to place terrains on the map for bonuses and port connection. Like most challenging games you want more actions than you have. It’s also interesting to see which cards to play vs discard.

I have really enjoyed my plays of Sweet Lands on TTS. I can’t wait to get a physical copy and admire all the wooden bits.