I wasn’t aware of Beacon Patrol as a board game but when I saw the trailer for Beacon Patrol as a video game, I found the premise compelling. It wasn’t until I was in the menus that I realised it was a board game, which promptly meant I had to study the rules! It is a simple on the surface game, designed for co-op play for 1 to 4 players to score as many points as possible before the group runs out of tiles. Oddly, what kept me playing longer was the additional new Exploration mode added for the video game adaptation.
Beacon Patrol takes place on the open seas. Players start off with a deck of tiles, and upon each turn, a player draws three from the top of the deck. A tile will have sea, but it may also have land mass too. Depending on which edges of the tile that the land covers determines where you might want to place it. You see, each player plays as a ship sailing the seas and coastline searching for buoys, beacons, lighthouses, wrecks, and all kinds of other nautical objects. It is these objects that score points, but they only score points if they are surrounded by tiles to the north, south, east and west of them. This is why land mass is so important. If land is on the bottom of the tile you are sailing on, you’ll need to place a tile underneath that has land at the top of it to form a coastal island. Tile selection plays a huge part in Beacon Patrol’s gameplay because, in all likelihood, you won’t get a perfect tile selection. Instead, you might get a tile with north and east landmass, and so begins the weird and wonderful coastal outlines of islands you may never be able to fill.
Different objects score different sets of points, and because Beacon Patrol is a co-op game, one of the moves you can make is to swap a tile with another player to keep the explored sea as compact and tight as possible. This is important as standard ships can only move four tiles per turn without placing a tile to gain back a move. If you can’t place at least two of your three tiles down, you’ll have to discard tiles until only one remains to complete your turn. Scoring points regenerates your tile deck, but as the sea grows bigger, it’ll be trickier to keep up, and so the game will naturally end when all the tiles are laid. The board game mode is a faithful recreation of the original board game and comes with three expansion packs to toggle between for some gameplay variation.
New for the video game is Exploration Mode, which provides various unlockable ships, each with different skills that in turn unlock lots of the nautical objects that score lots of points. It starts out slow, like an extended tutorial, but soon the different ships and their skills fundamentally start to change the way the game plays. Some ships score more points with lighthouses or fishing spots, whilst the hovercraft can spend 2 moves to jump over land. I found myself playing more in Exploration Mode than the actual board game, mainly as I was playing single-player most of the time, but also because it taught the game mechanics through clever gameplay. As you play, you unlock more objects and usually a ship that specialises in using them to score lots of points. Alongside this, you’ll also have creative mode, which removes all the rules and lets you lay down tiles without worry of moves or points.
My only mild critique of Beacon Patrol probably goes against its ethos. I feel like this game could easily have had a competitive versus mode. Imagine setting up a lighthouse to score 3 points only to have another player lay the last tile and take it for themselves. It’d be like a seagull-filled tic-tac-toe on spinach! Beacon Patrol is co-op through and through, but it does feel like a missed opportunity. The other mini critique I’d give is that sometimes you get some poor hands of tiles that you can do very little with. Luck plays a part in this game and sometimes you’ll be making do with a shoddy hand more than you’d like.
Those are minor niggles in what is otherwise a sea-breezy strategy tile placement game. With no time limits, a fast undo function, and plenty of seagull charm and pencil ink artwork to enjoy, Beacon Patrol is a delightful title. You’ll need to have friends or family who want to work together to score big, but the strong theme and understandable gameplay rules make it a decent choice for a digital board game that’ll be done in 20 minutes. Fun.
A review copy of Beacon Patrol was provided by the publisher. Beacon Patrol is out now.
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