Mystical cats and Tetris shapes make for family fun in the board game Wispwood

I’m a pretty simple guy when it comes to board games. I want to think while I’m playing, and I want to enjoy myself. If it’s not fun, then it feels like work. If I’m not thinking, then I might actually prefer working. That usually means I gravitate towards games that do something new, whether it’s a mechanic or idea that I haven’t seen before, or a new way to use familiar rules or concepts found in other games.

Wispwood, from first-time designer Reed Ambrose, fits well into the latter category. The game feels instantly familiar, as its core concept of taking polyomino tiles (think Tetris) and using them to cover a grid on your personal board is a popular one; Wispwood reminds me quite a bit of Cartographers, and there’s some Cottage Garden here as well. Where Wispwood varies the formula is in how that’s implemented in specific turns, from tile selection to the small decisions you make that affect your scoring for the remainder of the game, as well as the way you mostly reset your board after each of the first two rounds.

In Wispwood, players will select ‘wisp’ tiles from a shared market that has polyomino shapes written in the spaces between the wisps. When you choose a wisp, you also choose one of the two polyomino shapes bordering it, and then place one-space tree tiles on your grid to match that shape, with your first placement of the game going next to your start tile, showing your cat (because of course it shows a cat). You then select one of those trees and replace it with the new wisp, usually wherever you’d like, to try to maximize its scoring at the end of the round. In the first round, players fill a 4×4 grid, which goes to 5×5 in the second round and 6×6 in the third. If you can’t or don’t wish to take a wisp, you can select three tree tiles and place them anywhere on your grid. A round ends once one player has filled their grid, with a small bonus if you filled yours in that round. At that point, you score everything you’ve placed, including all four wisp types as well as scoring for your trees, and then remove the trees—but not the wisps—to start the next round.