Culture
Coral magic There’s nothing quite like the feel of board games, especially this colourful one involving ocean ecosystems. Opponents may take the tile you wanted and scoring is fiendishly complex, but it is a great way to relax, says Jacob Aron
I’M DOING something different this month, swapping consoles for cardboard with anew board game I think New Scientist readers will enjoy. Aqua: Biodiversity in the oceans is a delightful tile-laying game for one to four players in which you match colours to build an ecosystem, starting with coral reefs, building up to small animals and eventually larger predators.
The first thing you will notice is Aqua’s bright artwork and chunky hexagonal tiles. Look and feel are so important in board games since part of the joy is handling physical objects rather than staring at a screen, and Aqua totally nails its aesthetic. The game is a riot of colour, as befits a coral reef.
Each player begins with a “hot spot” that serves as the nucleation point for their reef system. They then select tiles to add to it. Each tile is split into three colours of coral, and there must be at least one match with an existing piece to place anew one. When you complete a hexagon by matching three corals of the same colour at a point, you form a “habitat” and can put a tile on top showing the small animal that would live there, from green turtles to yellow clownfish.
This sounds simple enough, and it is – little explanation is needed to start. Where things get complicated is the scoring. As you build your habitats, there will be corals left over that don’t form a trio. Any grouping of four or more count as a “reef”, scoring points for any adjacent small animals. This creates a tension – do you build more habitats, and increase the number of small animals, or go for reefs, potentially scoring your small animals multiple times? But wait, ther
