Tranquility Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Tranquility, a cooperative board game published by Lucky Duck Games. In Tranquility, players are trying to fill up a grid of cards in numerical order using only limited communication.

The seas are calm and you’re ready for an adventure. Luckily your sturdy ship is primed for an expedition across the archipelago in search of paradise. The only thing that can get in your way now isn’t an approaching hurricane or even an errant pirate ship, but rather a mis-sequenced island that will throw you off course and leave you forever lost at sea.

Tranquility is a cooperative hand management card game that features limited communication between one to five players. It’s designed by James Emmerson with illustration by Tristam Rossin and published by Lucky Duck Games. Playtime is approximately twenty minutes.

Pack a lunch. Bring a friend. Hop aboard the good ship Tranquility and let’s sail for a chance to discover our piece of bliss out there on the watery horizon.

The object of Tranquility is to fill a 6×6 grid with island cards in sequential order from bottom-left to top-right. The catch is that these cards are numbered from one to eighty, shuffled, and mixed into equal piles per player, and the only way to win is to also activate a Start card during play and a Finish card at the very end.

Players have a hand limit of five cards. During a turn, they can either place a card onto an open space on the grid or they can discard two cards to refill their hand. Adding cards to the grid starts out wide open, but as more cards enter, the possibility of playing next to another card emerges. When a card is placed adjacent to another (e.g., 45 next to 47), the player must discard from their hand the number of cards equal to the