Lagoon: Land of Druids Review

Lagoon, we need to talk. You're an abstract game. A pretty good one, at that. So why you gotta pretend to be something you're not? No matter how much you gussy yourself up with gorgeous fantasy artwork and special abilities on each tile, you'll never be Magic: The Gathering. So please, do us all a favor and stop trying.

See, Lagoon's a classic case of fallacious expectations leading to dashed hope. Thanks to 3500 Kickstarter backers and some pretty artwork it hit a lot of tables on launch day, especially for a game from an untested indie publisher. And from many of those tables emanated rumblings of discontent. People saw a game about druids featuring "Sites of Power" called thing like Eye of the Forest and Flaming Lotus, and they expected...well, not a slightly more complex version of Hive, that's for sure. That initial cannonade managed to hit some of its target audience, but it resulted in a lot of civilian casualties.

You can't really blame the consumers for this one, though. Lagoon has an image problem. It's misleading on multiple levels. During the game, players will use their circle of druids (represented by five cardboard tokens) to explore new Sites of Power, "invoke" the abilities of currently existing Sites, with the ultimate goal of "unraveling" certain sites, removing them from the game and essentially scoring those tiles. Doing well at the game requires lots of careful maneuvering, timing, and an ability to read your opponents' intentions. The tiles all come in three colors, representing the three types of energy in the primal land of Lagoon. At the end of the game, whichever color has the most tiles still in play is declared dominant, and players score based on their allegiance to that color— one point per seed of energy (gained by exploring) matching the dominant color, and two points per unraveled tile of the other two colors.

This scoring system isn't broken, but it appears to be—another image problem. It means that the most closely-fought battles will result in the most disparate scores. If a game was neck-and-neck to the final turn, the winning player might end up 23 points ahead of the loser. If both players pretty much did their own thing, scoring opportunistically based on the color that seems to be winning, then their final scores might be separated only by a single point. This leads to the feeling that the game is swingy and luck-dependent, but that's not really the case. Even though the final scores don't accurately reflect the closeness of the game, the better player will still win almost every time.

I mentioned Hive earlier because Lagoon borrows one of its central mechanics from that other well-loved abstract hexagonal tile-laying game. As in Hive, good play in Lagoon often involves "locking" tiles to prevent your opponents from moving or unraveling them. A tile is locked when it's the only thing connecting one or more tiles to the rest of the group. Since unraveling tiles both provides the primary scoring opportunity and changes the balance between the three colors, keeping tiles locked in play provides players control over the outcome of the game.

Unlike Hive, which provides five distinct types of tiles with their own special abilities, every tile in Lagoon has a special power. We're looking at 27 double-sided tiles for 54 possible special abilities. Frankly, in my opinion, this isn't a feature of the game; it's a bug. At first, it promises endless variety, a new game every time you play, but in practice, only about 1/3 of those special abilities are actually useful, and about 1/10 of them are so useful that you'd be an idiot not to put them into play. A disappointing number of the tiles offer only onetime abilities that take effect as soon as you explore the tile, and those misfire most of the time, requiring a finicky cost and situational usefulness.

This is a bug in the game because exploring tiles is the other way players can control the dominant energy of Lagoon. Whenever you explore, you get to choose which side of the tile to put into play; each side will always feature a different color and ability. That means that a lot of the time, you're forced to put a lame ability into play just because it supports your chosen element, and if it's a one-shot tile, it's just going to sit there like a lump, begging to be unraveled. 54 different abilities sounds great on paper, but it ends up hurting the game balance and overall experience. Much better to repeat 27 or even 15 abilities that are consistently interesting than throw in a bunch of duds just for variety's sake.

That being said, Lagoon's still a strange and delightful game for the abstract crowd. Aside from the tense back-and-forth fight for color dominance, Lagoon's most innovative feature is the way the druids in your circle work together—on your turn, you can exhaust any of your druids to invoke the power of a tile that any of your druids is sitting on. You can also draw energy from the tiles you occupy to do some unraveling on the cheap. Put together with the varied special abilities on the tiles (when they matter), this makes each turn of Lagoon an intense tactical puzzle in the midst of a strategic battle of positioning and denial. If you are into thinky games in which every detail matters, you'll find that Lagoon scratches that itch well particularly as a two-player contest.