AQUALIN
Designer: Marcello Bertocchi | Publisher: Kosmos
It’s hard not to love a satisfying clack of a tile bumping into its neighbour on the seabed. Or indeed, the clack of it bumping into another, newer, neighbour as a player shifts a blue crab away from its blue friend and next another crab.
Aqualin is a colour-or-pattern matching tile-laying game. One player takes the role of bunching together colours, the other creature type. Turns are a simple matter of firstly sliding a creature horizontally or vertically, next taking and placing a tile from the face-up market of six tiles, and replenishing the market.
And it’s really good in that duelling, chessy kind of way that abstract games offer. Players take turns shifting their opponent’s pieces around the board, ideally blocking them with the piece they’re about to lay, adding to their growing collection of contiguous animal or colour shapes. The game really heats up when players realise the best moves in the deep are the ones where you give the opponent impossible choices on their turn. They could shift the turtle back to its turtle-enclosed spot, or instead, because of where you’ve moved it to they have the chance to block you by bumping it along a couple of squares. Of course, doing that might be what you’re hoping – so the range of second guessing a player can set up (especially with a good eye on the market) is oceanic.
The whole thing is beautifully put together, nice to look at, and yes, pleasing to hear. It’s got longevity beyond its simple abstract confines, and offers depths that while not exactly Mariana Trench deep, should at least be unsettlingly refreshing when you look down.
CHRISTOPHER JOHN EGGETT