Color Field Review

boardgamequest.com:

My partner and I enjoy art, so any board games that play around with the theme of painting or canvases catch our attention. It can be boring to keep playing our favorites in this genre so we’re generally willing to give new titles a chance to expand our options.

Color Field is an abstract artistic game for 2-4 players that takes about 30 minutes to play. The best experience is with four players to cycle through all the paint tiles available.

Over the course of three rounds, players compete to have the most points from their paintings. Each round consists of three phases: prime your canvas, fill the palette board, and complete your painting.

To prime your canvas, you will choose which paint tiles to keep for the canvas. Once all players have six tiles, the palette board is filled with three tiles from the paint deck for the current round. Then, to complete a painting, players will draw and replace paint tiles on their canvas. The old tile goes to the discard space on their player board.

Players score points at the end of the round for each matching edge and for the largest patch of one color on their canvas, so it’s in their best interest to rotate their new tiles to optimize for scoring. If a player finds there’s a different way to adjust their canvas, they can use Inspiration tokens to do so.

The player with the highest score takes 1st position, second highest takes 2nd, and so on. The position determines how many tiles the player can keep to the next round, which is a built-in catch-up mechanism. The new round then begins with whoever has the First Player marker.

As with any artistic game, the first thing I noticed was the use of alternative colors that appear to be easier for color blindness. This gives the game box itself a more appealing aesthetic on the game shelf than others that emphasize bold or primary colors, which I enjoy quite a bit. When digging into the game components themselves, the painted shapes on tiles were easier for my brain to parse as my