Neotopia Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Neotopia, a pattern building game published by Arcane Wonders. Neotopia will remind people of the hit game Azul with its pattern matching and friendly ruleset.

There is a long-standing policy at Board Game Quest Headquarters that states any game containing components that could be mistaken for candy has to be sent my way for review. It should come as no surprise to you then, Dear Readers, that the moment Neotopia landed at BGQHQ it was destined for my gaming table. A ton of chunky, colorful discs with interesting patterns adorning them? Delicious.

Culinary excellence aside: does Neotopia: The Game compare favorably to Neotopia: The Menu Item? Read on to find out!

Neotopia is a tile-placement, pattern-building game designed by Orlando Sa and Andre Santos for 2-4 players. The game breezes by and will likely be over before you know it in 40 minutes or so.

There aren’t many rules in Neotopia to speak of, so I won’t dwell too much in this section. The board is divided into three “regions,” each containing a series of spots for the aforementioned tasty discs. Players will score each of these regions separately by completing pattern cards once they can line up the discs in specific configurations.

On a player’s turn, they have the option of placing a tile into one of these regions from the board’s central “factory” (essentially a place where new tiles spawn randomly once they’re emptied). If this placement causes a match to a pattern on a card in their hand, they can score that card.

Players can also draw a new card instead, but only patterns a player completes themselves can score. There’s also a scoring quirk in which players can’t trigger the scoring of a pattern card in a region if the card type matches the one that was last scored. This is a weird rule to be honest; I suppose it might be a self-balancing attempt so the disc colors in the region become more varied, but it felt more like a stalling mechanism than anything else. (We also forgot to implement