Last Lantern

• Designers: Jeremy Ducret, Gricha Cerman, Anthony Perone 
• Publisher: Wonderful World Board Games
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4nP8h9F 

Last Lantern is a 2 to 4-player co-operative polyomino game with set-collection and bag-building elements. As residents of the canopy, players puzzle their way forwards to the now dimming last lantern by placing tiles. Rely on the powers of familiars to not give in to the isolating fog and—perhaps—discover a way to ward it off forever.  The game is played over seven to nine rounds. Players, without communicating, simultaneously choose one set comprised of a tile and a token. The tile is placed on the path before you, moving you closer to your goal, while gaining three different tokens that activate powerful abilities. Echoing the best co-ops, discover ways to communicate by analyzing both the board state and tokens in hand, bettering your group dynamic with each play.

Place the Canopy board on the table and arrange the cover board to display the portion of the board needed for your player count.  One yellow firefly per player are placed on the lanterns at the top of the board and the familiars are placed near their areas at the bottom of the board.  The tree tiles are mixed up in the tree bag, and the firefly bag is filled with 4 black flies and 4 yellow fireflies.  Place the ability tiles near the board.

Players each choose a Character, taking the Character wheel in hand and placing their token on one of the paths on the board.  Each player gets a starting Familiar based on which path they start on.  The paths are the white squares that are 3 boxes tall,  There is a single tan row of boxes between the paths

The game is played over a number of rounds, each having these four phases: 

1] Choosing Tree Tiles and Familiars –  For each of the positions at the bottom of the board, a random tree tile is drawn and placed next to it.  Players now use their character wheels to secretly and simultaneously choose which of the areas they would like to take.  (Players may not verbally communicate in this part of the phase).  Wheels are revealed and players take the tile and familiar from their chosen area.  If multiple players choose the same area, they can freely discuss how to divide the contents.  Unchosen areas simply remain there for now.

2] Placing Tree Tiles – players with tiles now place them on the board. The first tile must be placed orthogonally adjacent to one of the leftmost blocks in the path, later tiles must be adjacent to at least one previously placed tile (of any player).  Players can place in the white boxes of their path as well as the darker border lanes.  Tiles may not extend into another player’s lane. If you cover up a Firefly on the board, it is returned to the supply. 

Players can also use familiar abilities in this phase.  If you spend a set of 1 pink, 1 green and 1 yellow familiar, you can trigger one of the following three effects:

• Remove the rightmost tile from the path astray area
• Draw 5 fireflies from the firefly bag and put them in the supply. Then add 5 yellow fireflies to the bag
• Choose one ability tile and place it anywhere adjacent to a previous tile (can be in anyone’s path and can cross through the brown barrier row)

You can also use 2 white familiars to give any player one non-white familiar

Before this phase ends, check to see if the game ends – if someone has crossed the purple goal line at the right of the board.  If so, move straight to the final phase.

3] Draw Fireflies – check to see if any players have crossed a Lantern Line in their path (for the first time).  For each, place a yellow Firefly from the corresponding lantern at the top of the board into the bag.  Then, for each unfilled space to the left of that line in that player’s path (including the shared row), draw a firefly from the bag and place it on that empty space.  If the bag is empty, place a black fly from the supply on that space.   At any time, if there are four black fireflies on the board, the game is immediately lost.

4] Place Abandoned tiles on the Path Astray – any unchosen tiles from the first phase are now placed on the Path Astray at the top of the board.   Based on the space filled, add the shown number of black fireflies to the bag.  At any time, if the Path Astray is completely filled with 8 tiles, the game is immediately lost.  

The game ends when someone has crossed the rightmost goal line.  After all players have placed their tiles for the round, fireflies are drawn for EVERY unoccupied space left on the board. If there are fewer than 4 Fireflies on the board after this final draw, then the players win!

My thoughts on the game

When I first heard about this game (Spiel 2025), it sounded like a fine cooperative game, but between a lack of luggage space and my still level of distrust of cooperative games, it didn’t make the trip home.  Now that the game has a domestic release, I was again given a chance to try it, and I’m glad that I did!

Last Lantern is a game which allows the players to figure out which pieces are desirable for each player in the game.  Of course, during this important step, verbal communication is verboten.  There is a lot of skill involved with this as well as familiarity with the game.  In our first games, we made a lot of errors, but as we learned how the game worked and how each player preferred to play, we got a lot better as a team.

When looking at the tiles, the first thing to look at, obviously, is how the tile would fit into the lane of each player.  While an exact fit is nice, it is not paramount.  We found that it was OK to leave some gaps, sometimes large ones, in a lane as drawing black flies out of the bag and then removing them with ability tiles is a powerful way to remove them from play.

It’s also obviously important to watch how quickly players are passing the boundary lines because if you cross one too soon, you end up having to fill in too many empty spaces.  While I mentioned earlier that placing a few flies is a good way to get the black ones out of the bag- the hard limit of 4 black flies doesn’t allow you to just put a bunch down either.

I found that it is also important to consider where a player is located on the board.  The players at the top and bottom only have a single shared row while the two players in the middle have two rows to deal with.  Those players in the middle thus need to have slightly larger pieces on average to keep up with the players on the outside.

One other strategy that we didn’t pick up without experience is knowing that it’s OK, and sometimes desirable, to purposefully match another player.  You are able to keep 8 tiles on the Astray path, and there are plenty of times that it’s better to put a tile there and take the black files as opposed to putting down a polyomino that simply doesn’t work.

As a final consideration, the powers of the familiar actions can be huge, and there are plenty of times where a player might end up trying to choose a tile for the associated familiar and not for the tile itself.  In a four player game, you also get the “wild” white flies which can really help you use those familiar actions more often.

The board is set up to scale for player counts between 2 and 4 – and you use the cover boards to shrink the canopy as needed.   This was a confusing thing to figure out from the rules, and I wonder whether it would have been better to have a double sided board.  One side could have the 4p setup with all 4 familiar areas while the other side could have the setup for 2-3 players.  I mean, we figured it out in the end, but the confusion about setup was real.

One other ergonomic feature that I would have liked is another way to note player identity – whether that be a token to put in front of the player or the character illustration to also be on the BACK of the action selector.  There is great art on the selector facing the player who is using it, but it sometimes is hard to remember who is the blue player and who is yellow, etc.  And other players can’t look at the art on the front of the selector because then they’d see the secret choice.  This only matters during the one phase that you can’t openly communicate, and it was a bit of a frustrating pain point at times when people made poor choices because they confused which player was in which lane on the board.

Those things aside, Last Lantern is a nice tight game (at least at 4p, the only way that I have tried it).  The game is honestly nicely paced with constant pressure to find the right polyomino without jumping too far ahead of everyone else.  Once you are familiar with the basic rules, there are plenty of included expansion modules in the box which you can use to add variety or increase the level of difficulty.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

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

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4nP8h9F