I love the way tabletop games transport to different places. Many of them are worlds of fantasy full of shining kingdoms, magical creatures, big-stompy robots, or space wizards. Others are based in our world are celebrate something unique about a region. PARKS, as an example, celebrates the beauty of the National Parks in the United States.
Águeda is another example as we dive into the Portuguese city’s summertime festival as one to five players work as street artists to balance the needs of the shops on their street to build the most beautiful collection of umbrellas. The game was made in conjunction with the Umbrella Sky Project.
Gameplay Overview:
The goal of Águeda is to build the most desirable display of umbrellas as you paint your mural, unlocking additional tourists, which, ironically, are workers.
There are four steps to each player’s turn. The first is to select a diagonal of umbrellas from the Market Board. If you select a diagonal with only one umbrella, you take that umbrella and a coin. A diagonal with two umbrellas gets both while a diagonal with three umbrellas costs a coin.
The second step is to place the umbrella(s) on your player board, which can be done in any order without skipping spaces. If you cover a paintbrush spot matching the color of one of your facedown mural tiles, you can flip that tile (which is the third step). Any umbrellas that don’t fit onto a row are returned to the draw bag. Once you have both mural tiles within a row flipped art side up, you can add that tourist to your available worker supply by placing them on a suitcase space.
The fourth step is attracting tourists. You can tell because the meeples have cameras around their necks. Or maybe they’re paparazzi. Either way, you can place one tourist on a row of your display to gain one point per color of one of the umbrellas on that tourist tile. You can also opt to place two to collect points for both colors. Alternatively, you can take a break and pull your tourists back from the tiles and then shift the row tiles down one spot with the one that falls off the bottom rotating into the top slot.
After a player’s turn, the supply is refreshed with more umbrellas from the bag being added to empty spaces following a pattern of top to bottom and left to right.
The game continues until one player fills their board with umbrellas at which point they take the bicycle token and each other player gets one last turn.
Scoring is based on the tiles on your mural flipped over to the completed side, the points earned on the shop tiles, and losing one point per open space on your board.
Game Experience:
The first thing to mention, and I feel this is the norm with 25th Century games, the production is fantastic. I love the feeling of drawing the umbrellas from the bag and the game is colorful, playful, and inviting. I hesitate to call it cozy as there can be some interactions between players as desirable umbrellas are removed from the Market Board but it’s definitely more cozy than cutthroat as there are times when certain colors either aren’t showing up or are very desirable.
To me, this incidental player interaction is minimal as the game generally plays out as a multiplayer solitaire experience. It’s possible to watch other players’ boards carefully and spend your turns hate drafting but if that’s your jam this game may not be for you. And also, why are you so mean?
However, with three rows to work on, umbrellas being taken from the market is more of a minor setback than a game-wrecking situation until late in the game when things tighten up. I found the bigger issue was I’d want to grab three umbrellas and didn’t have coins so taking a single umbrella often became my “I don’t love what I’m seeing” move. Where this strategy shows some limitations is that the game ends a turn after the first player fills their board and empty spaces subtract points, a la Sagrada. As the game winds down you can get a feel for how many turns you will have left to fill your board and this is where it slows down and gets more intense as players scrape for those last points.
Scoring for tourists was an interesting aspect of the game. Once a tourist tile has a tourist on it, you can’t add another one. Placing a tourist essentially doesn’t cost anything other than a future opportunity and eventually, you’ll need to clear the board of tourists and earn zero points that turn. The most difficult concept for new players was that tourist tile moving while the mural requirements stayed the same. However, depending on how your row is shaping up, shifting the scoring tile might open up some good opportunities in a future round.
The scoring cards have a lot of different goals that influence placement beyond just placing tiles to flip mural tiles and will slightly change up the overall experience a bit. But this game generally will play out fairly similarly each time and does so in a fairly snappy and very accessible manner. Games get longer as the player count increases and 10-20 minutes per player is probably a fair time estimation. Overall, this is a great gateway to gateway plus game but with enough meat to be satisfying for many gamers. It’s not going to replace Kanban or your favorite Brass for the heavier gamers out there but it’s light fun with simple choices to make each round.
In Águeda, I felt like I often had multiple options to pick from but, with other players or solo bot, I couldn’t map out my next few moves making the game feel more tactical than strategic. There’s still a lot of strategy in how you build out your player board, but not so much in the drawing of umbrellas from the market. In that regard, the game is largely read and react with light planning for the future with placing and removing tourists. As the game nears the end there is some tension as you try to finish your mural and not end up with empty spaces but it is possible that the color you need doesn’t show up. This is more likely in a lower player count game as there is less turnover on the umbrella supply.
Final Thoughts:
I knew nothing about Águeda: City of Umbrellas when I offered to review it but saw it was light and looked gorgeous so figured it was something my family would enjoy as well as would also fit into the Friday afternoon board games my team occasionally played after work. This was a pleasant surprise and a game I really enjoyed. I even had it in contention for my best game (so far) of 2024. I could also see my enthusiasm drop off over many repeated plays but that’s true for a lot of games.
Final Score: 4 Stars – Águeda is a family-friendly game with a beautiful production that allows you build up a colorful player board through simple choices.
Hits:
• Top notch production
• Small tactical choices to make each turn
• Solo mode is smooth and replicates a second player really well
Misses:
• Multiplayer solitaire
• Hard to plan ahead
