Overparked, the latest game from Daryl Chow, published by Origame, is a traffic-themed, polyomino-ish, tile placement puzzle game for 1–5 players, with an estimated game time of 20–30 minutes. The story is: ‘It’s the day of the big concert and vehicles are coming in from all directions! Can you handle the rush of traffic by cleverly parking all incoming vehicles to maximize your points?’
How to Play
The rules are fairly simple: the round starting player turns the steering wheel to point to the ‘parking card’ they’d like to add to their hand, then all players simultaneously take the parking card beside their colour and chooses one from their hand to play. Most parking cards places have an image of a number of vehicles in a specific orientation; playing one of those entails placing the indicated vehicles on the player’s parking lot board in the indicated pattern without overlapping other vehicles or straying off the board. Other parking cards let the player acquire ‘keys’ or play motorbikes (single space vehicles, just right for filling an awkward space), etc.
If any vehicle doesn’t fit, it is placed in the ‘no parking zone,’ though ‘free actions’ (free in the sense of being played at any time; you pay a key to use them) can be performed to offset that, as well as to drive unruly vehicles out of the way. If there’s no space to place any vehicle, game end is triggered.
Scoring is rather complex: you score for largest connected group of each colour, as well as totally surrounded lorries and ‘objective cards’ (randomly selected at the start of the game, with goals such as filling an entire row with cars and no lorries to gain six points), then deduct points for empty spaces in the lot and items in the no parking zone, though those penalties can be offset by the player’s remaining keys.
The game includes a solo mode via a card-based ‘AutoBot’ that removes cards from play and competes for objectives. There’s also an advanced mode, in which the lorries offer tailored scoring opportunities, meaning more thought—much more thought—is required when placing them.
Impressions
As I said earlier, the rules are simple, but the complexity of scoring (if a game’s scoring sheet needs eight separate lines, it’s too complicated!) could lead to analysis paralysis. However, with everyone working on their board simultaneously, there’s not a lot of time spent hanging around with nothing to do.
Beyond the steering wheel interaction, where a devious player could force another player to pick up a card which might be detrimental to their play, the game feels like parallel games of solitaire, which does seem to be a common feature of polyomino/tiling games.
The game components are pleasantly chunky and well made, and everything fits well with the car theme of the game. Even the first player marker’s ‘GO’ is ambiguously typeset as a 60mph/kph sign.
One thing I found interesting is that while rotating patterns to fit is allowed, mirroring isn’t permitted, which does increase the challenge of the game. I suppose that allowing mirroring could be a house rule for easier games.
I do feel Overparked might run out of steam after a handful of plays since every game will be rather samey. Yes, the objective cards (three used per game, out of forty) add some variety, but even that might not be enough to retain interest. I could, however, imagine different parking lot player mats being a future expansion, perhaps offering asymmetric play, to increase longevity.
Comparisons
With the separate elements being placed together, this has the flavour of both polyomino games and uniform tile placement ones, and there are plenty of other games in that space. I can only mention a few here, the ones I feel are closest to Overparked that I also have some experience of. My City uses a similar polyomino placement mechanism but has a legacy mode, in which rules are gradually added and changed, making successive plays of the game a little different—somewhat like the choice of objectives in Overparked. Like those objectives though, I’m not sure if the changes provide enough variety to give the game a long lifetime. The Isle of Cats, a significantly more complex game (though the rules do include a ‘family mode’), brings card drafting and a tight (fish-based) economy into the mix. The game is a lot more dynamic and random than Overparked and might sustain interest for longer.
Moving away from polyominos but sticking with constrained space, there are overlaps with tile placement games such as Shallow Sea and Calico, in which scoring patterns are composed of simpler tiles. The main difference is that while you score for a variety of patterns, you don’t have to play any specific pattern and certainly not in one go (as you do with Overparked’s parking cards). Shallow Sea has a similar mechanism to the keys in Overparked, allowing the board state to be modified for additional scoring opportunities.
I should note that the one game it’s not like (well, apart from using keys to slide vehicles along) is Rush Hour, despite that being the first one that came to mind when I saw Overparked! In Rush Hour, the aim is to get vehicles out, whereas Overparked is all about packing them in.
Overparked is a nice head-scratcher of a puzzle game, and will definitely appeal to fans of polyomino games. As far as tile placement games are concerned, I think I prefer Shallow Sea though I can’t quite put my finger on why. However, for me, The Isle of Cats would be the winner of the bunch because it’s so much more than polyomino tessellation.
Finally, you can find out much more about Overparked on its Kickstarter page.
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.
