by W. Eric Martin

Designer Peter Ridgeway debuted in 2022 with Wildstyle, and he has two games due out in early 2025: Katmai: The Bears of Brooks River, which Osprey Games will release in February — look for his designer diary on that game later — and Builders of Sylvan Dale, which Ares Games has already placed on the retail market.

Builders has a relatively simple concept: Each player has two stacks of eight dwelling tiles, with four copies each of four dwelling styles shuffled at random into those stacks. On a turn, you play one of four cards in hand to place the topmost tile onto a dwelling matching what's depicted on the card, then draft a new card.

The game board features 13-20 tree bases (based on the player count), with each base being one of the four dwelling types. If you have more tiles on a base than anyone else — or the same number of tiles but are higher on the tree than them — you have prestige in that tree. At the end of a round, you score points equal to a tree's height — which maxes out at five player tiles — if you have prestige in that tree.

What's more, each tree is part of a district, with 3-5 districts on the board. If you have prestige in more trees in a district than anyone else — that is, pre-eminence — you score 2 points per tree in that district; if you tie with others for the most, you each score 1 point per tree.

Each card features 1-2 tools, and you can discard three matching tool icons to claim that tool, with you being able to use one tool per turn: an axe to chop off a tree's top tile, a hammer to move one of your top trees elsewhere, a treetop to block any actions in a tree, and a bridge that connects two adjacent trees, scoring you points equal to the height of each connected tree in which you have prestige.

Once a stack of eight tiles runs out, you score for prestige and pre-eminence, with the only other scoring occurring when you place a tile in a tree that already contains at least two other dwellings of the same type, with you being able to score a tree this way only once.


Unfortunately, while the concept is clear, I found the game unplayable thanks to the art and graphic design, which has me staring at four nearly identical dwelling types in non-distinct colors on twenty trees that frequently block one another and obscure which tree is located in which district.

I'd stare at the cards in my hand and not be able to decipher where I could play my current tile. I had to constantly remind myself of where I had prestige, thanks partly to my yellow tiles looking like the tree base dwellings, and I just started playing randomly rather than hold the game up by figuring out what seemed like it should be obvious.

I rarely play games online, but Builders seems like it might be ideal for a digital version in which I can have an overhead view of the game board with each district shaded in the colors of whoever would currently score thanks to pre-eminence and each tree color-coded for prestige. Instead of a dwellings that all feature golden windows in roughly the same arrangement, I could look at circles, squares, triangles, and spirals and have a better sense of where I could play a tile and what would result from that play in terms of potential scoring.

In other words, I'd divorce the game entirely from its current setting and paint it as an abstract design — which is the opposite of what Ares Games does with its in-house game releases. Ares wants players to live in the game worlds they've helped bring to life, and it turns out that I'm not a good fit for that or I'm incapable of being able to "read" a game built along these lines.

In the end, we abandoned our four-player game halfway through, and I'll forward this review copy of the game to the BGG library so that other folks can see how well the game stacks up for them. For more details of how the game plays, watch this video:

Youtube Video
Relevant times:

06:30 - Introducing the featured game
07:04 - Teaching the game
32:00 - Explaining what went wrong