Land vs Sea

I got Land vs Sea a few months ago but we never had a chance to try it until yesterday.  It looked like a pretty simple tile-placing game, and sure enough, that sums it up.  Each player has two tiles in their hand, and each tile is two sided.  So you have 4 patterns you can play.  Some have a symbol to play again, and some have a symbol to steal a tile from another player.  Otherwise, each turn you play a tile and try to complete a land or sea area, depending on which side you're playing.

To actually capture some areas is a lot trickier than you might think.  After a while, I found myself counting how many land edges or sea edges I need to complete each area.  But sometimes, just having the land-land-sea-land edges you need doesn't mean the tile solves the problem for you.  That piece of land of arm of the sea might escape in a new direction.

When you do complete an area, you get one point for each tile the area appears on, plus one point for any of the black (land) or white (sea) crosses that appear on some of those tiles.  There is a scoring track in the game box, but it only goes up to 50, so we figured that if you loop around, just stack a second disk of your color to represent +50 points.

The game had a "jigsaw puzzle" feel to it, but with all the pieces the same exact shape, the differences were in the pattern of sea vs land edges and whether the piece could close off a part of the map to score points.  So after the first game, I began thinking in terms of "I need a piece with sea-land-land that cuts off those two land edges."  With this in my head, it was easy to flip the available tiles to see if any of the sides would get the results I needed.

As for stealing a tile or going again, since you only have two tiles and don't draw new ones until the end of your turn, if you steal a tile from a player, they only have one tile left to play on their turn, and if you play again on your turn, you have only your second tile (front or back) to choose from.  It all balances out -- if the other player goes twice it feels like you lost a turn, and if they leave you with only one playable tile, it feels like losing half a turn.  If you pay close enough attention, you can steal the one tile your opponent needs to complete one of their spaces and see how annoyed they get.  

After we learned the overall pattern, the game got a lot quieter as we calculated the boundaries and moves.  That's a good sin for a game.  Get past the simple rules to the complexity beneath the surface.

There are additional scoring rules for connected series of mountains (land) or coral reefs (sea), then an additional optional scoring rule for caravans and trade routes.  We didn't use any of those yet.  The basic game was engaging enough, and sometimes it feels like modern games bog themselves down with options to look smarter.  We always try to start with the basics, and if we feel it should do more, we look for options.  Land vs Sea has a natural balance. 

Check out this massive continent of Land that I completed in our second game.

This one is a winner, something we will try again soon.