Camargue

• Designer: Timo Diegel
• Publisher: AbacusSpiele
• Players: 2-6
• Age: 8+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Camargue is a coastal region in southern France, and in the game Camargue you and your fellow players will recreate this landscape one tile at a time.  Together you create the beautiful Camargue region which is known for its unique landscape diversity and species-rich wildlife.  By placing landscape tiles, you build up the colorful landscape and earn points for doing so  The larger the area of a landscape type, the more points you will score.  If you then send an important helper to support others, you will be rewarded with plenty of points.

To set up, place the starting tile in the playing area and give everyone a hand of three tiles; tiles come in five landscape types with 2-4 paths leading to 2-4 edges, as well as helper tiles that each show two landscape types. All landscape tiles feature a Camargue emblem in the upper right to show how they must be oriented when played.  Each player also gets a scoring board which has three columns to represent your hundreds, tens and units of points.

On a turn, you either discard a helper tile from your hand and score 10 points, or play a landscape tile that extends at least one path already on the board, without cutting off any paths. After doing this, you score points equal to the number of contiguous tiles of the landscape type you just placed multiplied by the number of edges that your just-placed tile touches. For example, if you place a forest tile next to two other tiles, and it’s now part of a group of six forest tiles, you score 12 points. To end your turn, draw a tile.

If you have three tiles in hand, with at least one of them being a helper tile, you can play out of turn. If another player scores a landscape type present on a helper tile in your hand, you can discard that helper tile to score as many points as the active player. On your next turn, you do nothing but draw a tile.

In the rare case where you cannot legally play a tile, show your hand to everyone and let all players confirm that you cannot play.  Then, place an emergency tile anywhere in the play area and then take your turn as normal.

Once all the tiles have been played, whoever has the most points wins.

My thoughts on the game

Well I was sold on this game from the start of the pitch – “Tile laying game similar to Carcassone”. I’m instantly interested as Carcassonne is one of my all time favorite games..  Camargue is a visually pleasing tile laying game – it does really look nice as the area grows on the table with all of the interwoven paths growing ever longer.    

On the whole it feels a bit simpler than Carc.  The tiles have only one orientation, and you just have to make the paths always connect.  Scoring is a bit mathy at first, but once you get the hang of it – it honestly is pretty simple.   Even though you have a hand of three tiles (instead of the single tile you get in Carcassonne), the decision making tree seems less in Camargue.  

There can sometime be an obvious play, when you can attach to a large area and get 2+ sides; it doesn’t take long to figure this out at all.  If this doesn’t happen for you, then trying to place your piece to prevent someone else from getting a big payday is the general plan.  Well, unless you have a helper tile that you’re trying to take advantage of… then, in that case, maybe you do set something up so that you can piggyback on the success of someone else.

Luck of the draw naturally plays a decent role in the game, especially the helper tiles.  At worst, they are worth 10 points if you just discard them, but they can be worth much more at the end of the game.  Sure, you end up with a smaller effective hand size when you are just holding on to them, waiting for the opportunity to play them – but in my experience, it is a rare occurrence for a regular tile to be worth 10+, so getting a tile that guarantees that sum is a nice thing to happen.

Is it nice? or not?

The scoring board takes a bit of getting used to, and it helps if you take your time and simply add your points in the same order – I recommend doing units first and then tens and then hundreds.  Alternatively, ditch the board and use good old paper and pencil, or maybe the calculator app on your phone.  I know that the hundreds column also had ten spaces on it because why not – but umm, we haven’t had anyone get to 300 yet.

The other component issue that we had was the helper tiles.  The artwork, namely the blue sky, made it less than obvious to know what regions the tile was good for.  On more than one occasion, someone saw the yellow walls of the buildings (for the red region) and thought that the tile was for the yellow region (which has yellow wheat of similar color).   It was also very common for people to think they had a tile for the watery regions when all they were seeing was the clear blue sky – that happens to be nearly identical in tone.  I would have personally preferred a clearer way of denoting the colors on these tiles.

Camargue is an easy-going tile laying game.  The turns are each the same, play a tile in a good place (hopefully for a good score), and repeat.  As the game progresses, the colored areas on the map should continually enlarge, leading to higher scoring opportunities, and this is the majority of the game arc (if you can really call it that).  I’ve found that I’m most successful when I draw the tiles for the largest areas close to the end of the game.   It’s a pretty decent starter entrypoint to tile laying games but has otherwise left us wanting for more.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Doug G. – Shelley and I almost always play a game at least 3 times before we do a review on the podcast. However, occasionally a game is just too difficult for us to stomach beyond a single play. We ‘get’ it, but it certainly doesn’t do anything for us…and unfortunately that’s the case with this tile layer from Abacusspiele. It’s a stinker for us, and the scoreboard is more work than necessary.

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor