There’s something appealing about playing games based on real places—Tenby, for example, or Brass: Birmingham—so I was intrigued by a game that popped up on Gamefound recently situated on Sylt, a small German island off the Danish coast.
I have to confess the thing that grabbed my attention is the gameboard—a pretty accurate map of the island. At a metre long, though, the game will be a bit of a table hog!
In Björn Burow’s 1–4 player game SYLT, ‘The aim is to have THE perfect vacation on SYLT and be crowned ISLAND CHAMP, regardless of the weather!’ (From the rulebook.) You do this by visiting locations across the map and participating in activities appropriate to those locations, but beware that weather can stymie your plans—sounds a bit like taking a holiday in this country…
Gameplay
The first thing that happens per turn (a turn representing a day of your vacation) is a roll of 3 multi-coloured weather dice (wind, temperature and cloud cover); the colours are used to select a weather card and two overlays (the cream-coloured squares in the image above) which between them, present a subset of valid activities for the day’s weather.
Next, each player can take up to two ‘daily actions’ based on the cards in their hand. Two types of card are relevant here: locations and activities, and a player’s hand consists of 5 of each face-up in front of them, and there’s a drafting area consisting of 2 of each. At the start of an action, you add a single card from the drafting area or the face-down decks, then choose a location and activity card from your hand. I should pause here to describe the anatomy of the cards:
· Activity cards have a symbol at the top indicating what type of activity it is, and these have to match one of a cluster of symbols at the bottom of location cards in order to be playable with that location card (i.e., you can only perform activities in compatible locations—there’s no point in trying to windsurf unless you’re at a suitable beach); this symbol must also be visible on the previously mentioned weather cards and in the matching colour (it is unfortunate that dual-coding hasn’t been used here, making the game somewhat challenging if you’re colourblind, though I do note that the details of the game are not fully finalised);
· Food cards—I’m calling this out as a subset of activities, but which don’t appear on the weather cards, since you can eat whatever the weather; and
· Location cards have a similar compatibility graphic at the top, which has to match one of the symbols at the bottom of an activity card for them to be played, as well as a number indicating where that location appears on the map.
If you have activity and location cards with appropriately matching symbols and the weather is compatible, you can play the pair of cards (then removing them from the game). You move your player token to the relevant location on the map and can acquire a reward, such as a deckchair or seagull token, if it hasn’t been taken from the space already. Players can collect at most 5 of these bonus tokens. Cards also have a coloured image of the island on the top left corner, and this determines which of 4 scoring tracks you advance along when they’re played. The reward tokens have numbers and track colours on the back, and provide additional scoring at the end of the game.
After this, you can attempt to perform a second action, except this time, you additionally have to roll ‘move dice’ to determine if you’re able to travel from your first location to the second—these dice indicate what mode of transport you’re using (walking, cycling or driving), which give your travel range, though you can spend some of your limited supply of ‘Sylt Dollars’ to move farther. Even if you can’t reach the location for the combination you want to play, you can still use the move dice roll to visit somewhere within range on the map to pick up any bonus tokens there.
Joker cards also exist—these are set aside when drawn, to be used on a later turn, and another card taken. When used, the jokers offer special actions, such as drawing additional cards into your hand or penalising other players (e.g., sending jellyfish their way, ruining plans for beach activities).
At the end of a turn, you draw back up to 5 action and 5 location cards, new cards are placed in the drafting area, and the next player moves.
At the start of a game, players choose how many days their Sylt vacation will last, and the game is over on that turn number. At the end of the final day, players turn over their bonus tokens, adding their points to the appropriate scoring tracks; for each track, the player with the highest score is awarded an ‘island champ’ token, and the winner is the person with most of these, which sounds like an unnecessarily complicated way of saying that the winner is the person ahead in more of the 4 scoring tracks than anyone else.
The rulebook contains a couple of sentences about a simplified ‘junior’ variant, which skips the second action and move dice. The solo mode is rather uninspiring: you set a target number of points in each of the scoring tracks and try to reach that before the end of the vacation—it’s couched in terms of counting down from an initial value, but amounts to the same thing as moving up the tracks in normal play.
Campaign Overview
The campaign page is a tad untidy, and focusses on the appearance of the game rather than playing it, though a draft rulebook is available. Another substantial amount of the page is taken up with describing the rewards, which wouldn’t be too bad, except that several seem to merely be multiples of the game. Besides the base game, you can get a robust MDF deckchair-styled dice tower—much too big to fit in the game box, so perhaps more of a nuisance than a necessity. More interesting, though only slightly, are metal Sylt Dollars, but these play so little a part in the game that they don’t seem all that worthwhile. Oddly, a velvet pouch is available, though there’s nothing in the game that needs to be drawn from such a bag. The basic game price, without all these extras, isn’t awful at first glance, but remember to take into account shipping and VAT—those push the cost up significantly. Incidentally, the base game includes a book describing all the locations in the island—a cute ‘tourist guide.’
The page does contain a game overview, but it’s rather confusing, and most of the space is given over to showing example cards. The explanation isn’t helped by a rash of typos and convoluted prose, a criticism I also have of the rulebook, but hopefully that will be sorted out in the final game components. (However, given the ambitious project timelines, that could be challenging.)
This is only Björn’s second crowdfunding campaign (possibly second game too, as I can see no sign of him on BoardGameGeek), and the first didn’t hit its funding target—SYLT’s target has been reached already, but it was considerably less ambitious than CODEX’s.
Verdict
SYLT is an inventive and interesting looking game, pretty with it—Björn says that all the card pictures are from photographs he and the team have taken. Matching activities with locations is a nice touch, and I like the clever weather mechanism, though it’s not clear how much randomness the weather dice rolls creates in practice. I mentioned joker cards above, some of which can penalise other players; with open hands (apart from the single card players grab at the start of the turn, if they grab it unseen from the face-down deck), all players can see what each could play, including jokers, making it difficult to guess how well these can be deployed: playthrough videos would have been helpful here.
One criticism I have about the presentation is that the scoring tracks are rather bland, just anonymous colours; it might have been nice to equate them to aspects of a vacation, such as excitement or relaxation—totally arbitrary, of course, but fitting better with the theme of the game.
I’ve said elsewhere that I tend to steer clear first time crowdfunding projects unless they’re very low cost, so despite SYLT’s appeal, I think this is one I’ll take a pass on. Perhaps, if it proves to be very successful, there’ll be a second edition/reprint, at which time I’d be likely to jump on board.
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
