Partnering with the right IP can make a huge difference in finding an audience in the crowded space of modern board games; Star Wars: Battle of Hoth, Dune Imperium/Uprising, and Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship are prime recent examples.

The Voynich Manuscript, dating to medieval times, is an illustrated codex written in an as yet undeciphered language that addresses topics ranging from herbology to astronomy—its full meaning has stymied the likes of linguists, cryptographers, and historians for over one hundred years. To the creative mind and marketing genius of Dani Garcia, this clearly presented the perfect untapped IP for his latest Euro-style board game design. And shockingly, it’s not a deduction game.

In The Voynich Puzzle, 1-4 players compete over 90-120 minutes in a series of interconnected mini-games representing five topics of the manuscript, such that their combined actions add color and understanding to this grand mystery.

Gameplay Overview:

The Voynich Puzzle is played over a series of turns during which players will attempt to gain subject-specific knowledge points in distinct topics: botany, astrology, bathing, writing, and recipes. As subject-specific knowledge is acquired, players will share their findings with the broader community by adding a color-specific puzzle piece to a shared board. By moving their research tokens about this shared puzzle and ultimately landing in specific color groupings or patterns, players are rewarded with overall knowledge. Reaching 52 overall knowledge points is ultimately the end-game trigger.

The writing mini-game is shown here for a 2-player game, containing several star and writing tokens

Each of the mini-games is fairly straightforward and usually involves some version of placing a token on top of an icon or in a specific row or region that is associated with specific rewards that often interact with the other mini-games in a combo-tastic fashion.

Players choose a particular mini-game each turn via action selection, represented here as a specific spread within an asymmetric personal booklet containing 2 pages for each of the five mini-games. Players will activate one page per turn from a unique spread and perform its actions. Each page can be upgraded up to three times by accomplishing specific research goals, resulting in improved versions of the existing actions as well as a multiplier for end-game scoring opportunities.

At game-end, the player with the most overall knowledge points acquired both in-game and from end-game multiplier effects wins.

The central board with 5 mini-games and a shared puzzle is shown here.

Game Experience:

The Voynich Puzzle is a unique gaming experience, starting from the immersive theme and extending into combo-tastic tactical decision-making. Each of the individual mini-games is fairly simple. What makes the actions exciting is deciding the best order to activate the various mini-games such that their rewards are maximized based on your asymmetric set-up, the board state, and the inter-dependencies of each mini-game.

The botany mini-game is shown here, containing several leaf and water tokens.

The asymmetric cards in your personal booklet will generally determine your main actions, but a big consideration is that all pieces are limited. Main actions for the botany and bathing mini-games usually require water droplets or leaf tokens. If all your leaves have already been placed in botany, you likely cannot interact with this mini-game anymore until you move one of those leaves into another mini-game. Ideally, you’ll accomplish this by balancing your actions between bathing and botany so the pieces move back and forth.

The same goes for the astrology and writing mini-games, whose main actions require limited star and text tokens. The final mini-game, recipes, accepts all four types of tokens, which enhances your options. Additionally, each of the mini-games provides more limited secondary ways to interact with the other games. For example, there is exactly one spot within botany that will let you move a star from astrology into writing, but only if it’s not currently blocked by another player.

The bathing mini-game is shown here, containing several leaf and water droplet tokens.

Another key consideration is deciding when and what notebook pages to upgrade, which will affect both the strength of your main actions and also end-game scoring. If you’re doing really well in bathing and have accumulated many bathing-specific knowledge points, this will not necessarily grant any end-game knowledge points, unless you manage to upgrade your astrology notebook pages, which hold end-game multipliers for bathing. Every mini-game’s scoring is inter-dependent in this way: upgrading botany lets you score astrology; upgrading writing lets you score botany; and upgrading bathing lets you score writing. To do well, you’ll ultimately need to interact with every mini-game while focusing on a few.

The shared puzzle for a 2-player game is shown here near end game. moving the magnifying glasses (research tokens) into specific regions and/or color groupings is key to upgrading your action cards and scoring in-game overall knowledge points.

Player interaction will also impact your decisions. In order to upgrade your personal pages for big multipliers, you’ll need to move your research token(s) into specific colored groupings or patterns of a shared puzzle; all players help create the patterns and color organization of this puzzle. Also, while players may occasionally block the icons you want, most interaction is positive. Someone climbing up the plant stem in botany allows other players to leapfrog them, thus reaching higher/better rewards on the plant.

Special commendation must be given to illustrator Jorge Tabanera Redondo and graphic designer Joao Duarte Silva, who managed to recreate the beautiful illustrations of the original Voynich manuscript in a manner that directly feeds into gameplay. The starting action available for any given mini-game is depicted atop a Voynich-related backdrop illustration that’s a mere black-and-white outline. Upon upgrading this action once, the illustration gains shading and texture. Upgrade once more, and the illustration gains color. The final upgrade reveals the same illustration in its full glory. It’s a beautiful way to incorporate the theme into the gameplay.

Replayability is excellent, largely owing to the asymmetric action cards; there are 8 available for each mini-game, and you’ll randomly get 2 for each mini-game during setup (10 total). The particular combo of these 10 action cards is likely to dictate your strategy; you must work to maximize the synergies available in each card set. This can be an AP-inducing experience and may feel a bit long at 4 players. Three is best, and two-player games are still fantastic, but the board must be pre-seeded with puzzle pieces and neutral tokens that may permanently block icon spots.

A personal player booklet filled with action cards is shown here. Only the front of each card can be easily viewed. Cards must be upgraded twice before they get flipped to their reverse sides.

I also have a few critiques. As cool as it is to flip through my personal action booklet and upgrade the various actions, this format of information presentation means I cannot see all my various options and upgrade requirements all at once; the result is a lot of flipping back and forth as you decide on your next turn. Possibly in response to this, there are miniature versions of each booklet page available to display, but they only contain some of the relevant info. Ultimately, it’s best to thoroughly study your action pages (front and back) before assembling your book pre-game and try to decide on areas of priority and synergy. This may feel like information overload to some, especially in your first game.

My other main critique is that it’s too easy to gain bathing knowledge points with minimal effort, such that it frequently gets maxed out prior to end-game, and players are disincentivized to interact with this particular mini-game any further. The final nitpick is that the shared puzzle pieces should have been constructed from sturdier cardboard or another material to better withstand the test of repeated plays.

Final Thoughts:

The Voynich Puzzle takes a unique theme and beautifully implements it in the form of a competitive medium-heavy Eurogame with plentiful player interaction mimicking the collaborative academic spirit of the real Voynich manuscript. With asymmetric player set-up across its five interconnected combo-tastic mini-games, every play will feel different. The unique nature of both scoring and balancing the inter-dependencies of the various mini-games takes some getting used to and may cause AP, exacerbated by the need to flip through your action booklets for pertinent information. The game is great at all player-counts, but can be long at four and somewhat less dynamic at two. Playing the Voynich Puzzle is ultimately a joyful endeavor to strategically find synergies while tactically reacting to knowledge discoveries of your opponents, all of which dynamically adds color to the central board.

Final score: 4 stars—A true puzzle of a game where players seek the best synergies among five interconnected mini-games with beautifully thematic illustrations

Hits:
• Beautiful implementation of theme into the gameplay
• Unique upgradable action-selection system
• Tightly inter-connected mini-games that require a little bit of everything
• Positive player-interaction

Misses:
• Potential for AP, exacerbated by somewhat awkward-to-reference player booklets
• Bathing mini-game is too easy
• Puzzle pieces are overly flimsy