Topiary - Review

Should you give Topiary a passing glance in the store, or gaze longingly at it on the table?

We say...

Now, here's why...

Now, you might be asking,  "What the heck is a topiary?"  Topiary is the art of clipping and cutting bushes and trees into ornamental shapes.  Often, these trees or bushes can look like animals, people, or something completely different.

Well, the board game, "Topiary" is designed by Danny Devine, and distributed by Renegade Games Studio.  In this quick 20-30 minute game, players position meeples around the edges of a large topiary park.  Each player is trying to give their meeples the best views of the various topiaries in the park.

The topiary park is laid out in a 5 x 5 grid with variously shaped topiary tiles flipped over to their back sides.  The only topiary that can be seen at the beginning of this game is the one in the middle.  There are 5 varying sizes of each topiary, numbered from 1 to 5, with 5 being the largest and 1 being the smallest of that type of topiary.  On a player's turn, they may pick up and look at one of the face down topiary tiles in the park, and then, either put it back down face up, or replace that tile with another one from your hand.  Finally, the player must place one of their colored meeples comewhere around the outer edge of the grid so that meeple is looking down a full row, column, or diagonal line of topiaries.

The goal of the game is to get the highest number of viewer points by adding up the values of the topiaries that each meeple can see.  The caveat here is that meeples can only see topiaries that are smaller in front of the larger ones, so if someone places a number 5 topiary in your meeple's line of sign, then at the end of the game, that meeple will only score the number 5 and any other topiaries with a smaller number that are in front of the 5.  The larger topiaries block the shorter ones, so they cannot be scored if behind the larger ones.  

Therein lies the strategy of attempting to pick up and replace a topiary in order to make it beneficial to you while trying to obstruct your opponent's meeples from seeing too many topiaries.  The players continue to optionally look at and replace a tile, and then placing one of their meeples until the last meeple has been placed.  This triggers the end of the game.  At this time, all players add up only the values on topiaries that their meeples can see.  The player with the highest score wins Topiary.

So, what was our impression of "Topiary"?  After having played several games, which is easy since each game only lasts for about 20-30 minutes, we found Topiary to be a very enjoyable game.  It never outstays its welcome and has a bit of a chess-like feel to it as you constantly try to second guess where your opponent(s) will try to place their meeples.  Furthermore, you can always mess with your opponents by replacing topiaries to obstruct their view.  But be careful as this then welcomes them to do the same to you.  Topiary can be a bit of a brain burning experience, but is thankfully over before your brains start to hurt.   Because of it's short playtime and easy setup, you can quickly set it up for another game right away on the table.  

Because of Topiary's enjoyable gaming experience, easy setup, and quick playtime, we say...