Parks is a worker placement style game set across US National parks, where your two hikers will trek through trails across four seasons of the year. While on the trail, they will collect memory resources such as mountain, water, sunshine, and trees alongside taking pictures of the places they visit. These memories are represented by various resource tokenswhich will allow players to trade in to visit a park at the end of each hike.
Trails are represnted by lovely artwork tiles which are shuffled into a random order each season, with each trail also growing slightly longer as each season passes. These provide access to the resources but as you usually cannot visit a location where another hiker is already trails, you will need to plan for your turn order. Campfires will allow you a rare chance to share a space with other hikers, and canteens can be filled with water for extra rewards. Gear can be purchased to improve your access to resources through the game.
Once you have collected resources you can, at the end of each season, spending them to visit one of the three park available which will score you end of game points. There are opportunities to reserve certain parks if you want to be sure another player doesnt take it first, and there is camera which passes between players during the game, and taking pictures will reward extra points at the game end.
The production is lovely for a relatively small box you have thick artwork tiles for the trail, large tarot cards for the parks and gametrays to hold your resource tokens. It is a relatively straightforward game that looks fabulous with its artwork and theme and has just enough strategy without becoming overly complex. It has become one my wife’s favourite games and so earn a place in our collection, and is one of the few games that works well for two players as it generally remains close on victory points, and the theme just really engaging.