tabletopgaming.co.uk 73Illusion
15m 2-5 8+ £10W
hen the designer of one
of the most interesting
games of last year – e
Mind – comes out with a new game
from the same publisher – NSV – in
a box the same size and colour –
small and black – you’re going to
assume a connection. Is Illusion the
sequel to e Mind, a follow-up or
some kind of sibling?
No. It isn’t. e Mind is a tense
co-op played mostly in silence.
Illusion is a game about guessing
how much of a card is covered in
red, yellow, green or blue. at may
not sound thrilling and, though
Illusion tries hard, it isn’t.
e deck of 98 cards is at the heart
of the game, each one with a unique
four-colour abstract pattern on it.
With one card already down, the rst
player draws the top card and has to
judge whether it has less or more of
that round’s designated colour than^ PLAY IT? MAYBES
et in the universe of e City of
Kings, Frank West’s ambitious
and sprawling RPG-in-a-box,
this half-hour, light tile-placement
game is best served as an appetiser to
its predecessor’s hours-long bu et.
It plays like a combination of
Kingdomino and Honshu, with the
shifting tile/player order selection
of the former and the overlapping
cards of the latter – although here
only the rightmost column of squares
is covered, forming a constantly
stretching pathway through your
personal garden of soil, grass, water
and sand patches. Connected
areas only score if they containthree or more symbols, with bonus
points obtained by forming certain
combinations of icons required by
objective cards and placing lost items
by leaving certain squares uncovered.
‘Lesson’ cards restrict which card
suits from your hand can be played
each turn, while others occasionally
throw up the challenge of combining
two cards for an extra wide or tall
addition. Along with the inability
to rotate cards (apart from a lesson
that breaks that rule, ipping them
upside-down) and a limited height
allowed on your pathway, it means
Vadoran Gardens occasionally feels
overly strict on how and which cardscan be played, taking away some of the
interesting decision-making present in
those other tile-placement challenges.
It lands somewhere between lacking
the simplicity of Kingdomino and the
strategic thinkiness of Honshu, without
nding a comfortable middle ground.
Still, it’s a solid enough design
that bene ts greatly from being
handsomely presented – aside from
the odd decision to have one of the
player colours and lost item colours
match, and use purple and black
player pieces that can be hard to pick
out at a glance in certain light.
If you’re craving more of e City
of Kings, Vadoran Gardens’ visual
panache and bite-sized gameplay –
di erent though it may be – might be
enough to tide you over between full
courses. If you’re not already invested
in that bigger helping of this world,
though, this is unlikely to leave you
with a hunger for more.
MATT JARVISVadoran Gardens
30m 2-4 8+ £17PLAY IT? MAYBE
the one in play, placing it before (less
colour) or after (more colour).
If the next player thinks they’re
wrong they can challenge,
otherwise they have to draw a
new card and place it where they
think it ts in the card sequence.
Eventually someone challenges,
the cards are ipped to show the
percentages printed on the back
and someone gains a point.
It ’s Timeline with patterns instead
of dates, and more replayability but
less chance of being able to work
out the right answer with your
brain. It’s Liar’s Dice without the
randomness or blung. It’s fast and
clever, but it isn’t very interesting. If
you’re looking for something to sit
next to e Mind on your shelf, this
isn’t it.
JAMES WALLIS