Realm of Sand

EvEvanstar3,5

In this game you have a grid of recipe cards. On your turn you place a tetris tile onto the lighter spaces of your board, then replace the tile with a series of square tiles in the same shape and colors. The tetris piece goes to the back of the selection line, and then if the squares on your board match the patterns on cards in the recipe grid, you remove the squares to claim the card. The cards have victory points, or special round tokens you need for advanced recipes, or they increase your work space by allowing you to place on the darker spaces of your board. I have some trouble visualizing what I need to have happen when I'm playing this game. Ideally you are setting up your pieces so you are working towards several patterns at the same time, but I wind up uselessly working towards one at a time, often replacing spaces needlessly due to poor planning. This might not be a keeper for me, because it's just a little too fiddily with placing the piece then swapping it for other pieces, and the puzzle frustrates me. I want to give it one more shot to see if I can get used to it, because I do think there's some real potential for it. My friend who really enjoys pattern recognition games more generally had a great time with it. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ☆☆☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment