Beacon Patrol Review – Mapping Out a Seaside Adventure

Disclaimer: Beacon Patrol was provided for free by Pandasaurus Games, however, the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

Beacon Patrol is a charming cooperative game of sailing around a coastal archipelago. While you’re exploring the waters in your little wooden boat. It behoves you to play your favourite sounds of the ocean and lose yourself in its blue, white and orange landscape.

Now, while your end goal of getting victory points isn’t too riveting. How you get there is the real treat. As you place tiles, and explore them to earn points, you also create a lovely map of the ocean and islands inhabiting it. Along your journey, you’ll find lighthouses and floating buoys, these award points beyond your standard tile.

Now, to explore a tile you, must surround it with other tiles on all four sides. A difficult task, only because tiles must be placed on empty spaces next to where your boat is. Given your boat can only move three spaces a turn and can’t travel across land, it’s easy to see how difficult it can be to get to the backside of an island.

Thankfully, when placing a tile, as long as it’s connected by water, you get to move your boat onto it. So with some careful planning and tile placement, you can double the spaces you move on a turn.

However, another anchor is weighing you down.

Unlike Carcassonne and other tile-laying games, you can’t rotate the tiles in your hand. On top of normal tile placement restrictions, such as placing a land tile next to a land tile, and water next to water. This makes it a challenge to just find places to put your tiles, let alone position them for points.

Though as they say on the sea: for every anchor, there’s a tailwind. Or maybe they don’t, it’s been decades since I last sailed. The point is, you’re not alone. If you ever find yourself stuck, you can (once per turn) swap a tile with another player.

Otherwise, play continues until you run out of tiles. Then tally up your points and compare them to Beacon Patrol‘s score chart to figure out if you’re Novice or a Navigator.

Sail away, sail away, sail away

Remembering there are points involved is the real struggle of Beacon Patrol. Creating this delightful map of seaside islands is so satisfying in itself that you often forget the goal of the game. Thanks in large part to the calm minimalist colour scheme and artwork seemingly pulled from my childhood comics of Where’s Wally, or The Adventures of Tin Tin.

But Beacon Patrol is more than a beautiful blue map.

The restrictions around rotating tiles mean exploring is harder than you imagine. Although not impossible. Beacon Patrol walks the fine line between being too easy and too difficult like a practised high-wire act. Giving you enough options to mull over and come up with the right one, but not enough that leave you stranded in an ocean of deep thought.

All of these options arise from wanting to place all of your tiles on your turn. Because otherwise they get discarded. So placing them gives you the most potential for points. In doing so you often create an island formation so difficult to navigate that even the most capable captains avoid in fear of running ashore.

This puzzle of placing tiles and exploration is cozy and satisfying, but it’s also a solo adventure. The restrictions around movement and tile placements scatter you and other players to the winds.

So rather than solving one puzzle together, you’re solving several Siamese puzzles. Individual puzzles joined at the hip. Compared to something like Mechs vs Minions where cooperation is a necessity, Beacon Patrol lets you sail away and work on a piece of the map all to yourself.

That said, Beacon Patrol is not a great four-player experience. It’s no sunken wreckage, but players have fewer tiles and movements than in any other player count. Making it impossible to have a significant impact on the map, and easy to get stranded in the middle of nowhere.

Now for the mini-expansions

When you’re ready to mix things up, there are two miniature expansions in the box for you to tackle. The two expansions are called Windmills, and Piers. Together, they add 9 more tiles and a layer of complexity.

Windmills, as you might have guessed, adds open sea windmill tiles to Beacon Patrol. They score you extra points for each surrounding open sea tile. Since more wind reaches the mill, the more power it generates.

As a mini-expansion, Windmills is ho-hum. Although it eats up your open sea tiles, making the core puzzle tougher. It does so in an uninspired and uninteresting way. By dumping them out in the ocean with all the care of a Fortune 500 oil company.

Piers, on the other hand, is a mini-expansion I want to spend more time with. While Windmills rewards you for building out in the sea. Piers rewards you for putting islands together. Specifically islands with Piers and houses. So now you get points for completing islands, and for fleshing out the map in the process. Given how wonderful the cartography aspect is within Beacon Patrol, this is a double win.

Even though these mini-expansions aren’t needed additions, they’re certainly welcome. And amp up the difficulty for those after a challenge. But for me, the base version of Beacon Patrol hit that perfect level of adversity where it kept my engagement afloat for the duration, and then some.