‘Waterfall Park’ Board Game Review
Back in 1999, I was far more interested in getting drunk and listening to heavy metal than I was in board games, but for some people, the release of Karsten Hartwig’s Chinatown was quite a big deal. At almost twenty-five years old and over one million recorded plays, it’s no surprise that Chinatown was due a reprint – and so today I’ll be writing about Repos Production’s Waterfall Park, which seeks to reimplement Chinatown with a completely new theme.
In Waterfall Park, players take the role of administrators on a fantasy island fashioned like a giant leisure complex. They each take a clever piece of the insert on which two stacks of plastic frames are placed and sit around a board which is filled with curious little holes on each corner of a huge array of numbered spaces.
A round marker in the top right shows how many cards and buildings will then be dealt, and in a four-player example, in the first round everyone receives seven cards (and discards two) and five buildings. Each card denotes one of the spaces on the board, and the players will be looking to make groups of adjacent spaces.
When the discard is done, players take their coloured frames and place them onto the board, slotting them neatly into those holes I mentioned earlier. This is incredibly satisfying to do, and whilst I haven’t played Chinatown, I can imagine that without this feature, any knock to the board would probably cause absolute chaos.
Following placement, the players enter a negotiation phase where literally anything can be traded. One player might offer to swap two of their spaces for one of an opponent, someone else might offer one or more of their buildings (which are all placed face up in front of everyone) for a space, or a player may even choose to offer coins (which are points) in exchange for whatever they need.
At some point, negotiation will end, and now, the players will place their buildings onto the board – by slotting them into frames they control. Again, this is satisfying and practical, and as the board fills out with buildings, it looks fantastic. Special credit goes to the fact that the plastic frames (denoting ownership) remain visible even when covered with a building, and if that were not the case, Waterfall Park would be quite frustrating.
When buildings are placed, players score income for the round. Each type of building is designed to be placed in a group of between three and five, and the larger the group (if complete) the larger the income. All buildings will score some income, but if a building is part of an incomplete set, the income will be much lower than that of the same type of building in a complete set.
And so, over the course of four rounds, players will draft locations and place their frames, draw buildings and then negotiate to try and position themselves advantageously. Getting groups of spaces and matching buildings is the core way to win, but Waterfall Park also forces players to assess what their opponents have and to consider how moves might help them, so where some games about tile placement and set collection are quite solitaire in feel, the absolute opposite is true here.
Let me be clear – Waterfall Park is mechanically superb. It is very, very fast to teach and to learn, and it sets up in about 5 minutes thanks to those cool insert towers on which the frames are stacked. A game can be played start to finish in 30 to 45 minutes and everyone is involved all of the time, so whether you play with a minimum of three or the max of five, the game remains fun throughout.
If there is a major downside, I guess it is that negotiation is so fundamental to Waterfall Park that it might put some people off if they don’t enjoy social interaction. Whilst that’s not an issue for me, where I do find Waterfall Park a bit weak is in terms of theme – having not played Chinatown, I can’t say whether or not this is actually better, but in its own right, it’s just very, very vanilla and kind of irrelevant.
Waterfall Park fits a completely unique gap in my collection as the only big box, proper board game that is both quick to play and built entirely around negotiation. That means it’s likely to be a keeper, although with such a weak theme, it may not be played as much as it otherwise would.
That said, as my kids get older, it may well mean that such bright colours and concepts like building ghost houses and bowling alleys become ever more relevant. In any case, whether you like the theme or not, Waterfall Park is a mechanically superb game that ticks many boxes, and with such solid production value at a sensible price, it is a game you should consider adding to your collection.
