Savannah Park Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Savannah Park, a tile-laying game published by Capstone Games. In Savannah Park, players are placing animal tiles around their park hoping to score the most victory points.

Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling’s homes must be just absolutely covered in tiles they’ve used in prototyping. They’ve designed countless tile laying games. Hex tiles, square tiles, round tiles. Tiles with animals. Floor tiles. They are really the tiling experts.

Savannah Park is another in their discography. Simple to learn, family weight, and covered in cute animals. Savannah Park is a tile-laying game for 1-4 players that takes about 20-40 minutes to play.

Setup for Savannah Park consists of taking your 33 animal tokens and randomly placing them face up on the sand spaces of your player board. Each player does this separately, giving everyone a different setup. Each tile shows 1-3 animals (there are six different species) and some also show a watering hole. There is also one special tile with all six animals and a watering hole. It’s a very important tile… let’s get to why.

Players will take turns choosing a tile from their board, flipping it over, and placing it on a different space on their board. They will announce which tile they chose (“the tile with 2 elephants,” for instance) to all players and everyone must also flip and move that tile. Then the next player will choose a tile for everyone to move. Once a tile is chosen and flipped it can’t ever be moved again. This continues until all tiles are flipped and scoring takes place.

As you probably assume, there is a bit of a strategy to how you want to place these animal tiles. At the end of the game you’ll score each animal for the number of that species in that largest connected