Favorite Board Game for December 8th

#17 Finspan

In Finspan players are Marine Biologists exploring the ocean from the sun lit shallows to the darkest depths in order to study various forms of aquatic life. Each player has a board that represents their area of exploration. The board is divided into a grid of 3 columns and 6 rows. The cells created by these rows and columns are sized to fit cards. Cards represent fish, and players want to fill their boards with as many cards as they can.

Every action you can take is right in front of you on your player board. Right at the top, in a section of your board that spans all three columns is the ability to place a fish card. It's the first thing on your board and the first action you'll probably take on your first turn. Everyone starts with a hand of cards and you'll want to get a few of those down as soon as possible.

Playing cards onto your player board costs resources. These resources can be cards in your hand that you will have to discard (but don't worry, the game gives you many opportunities to reclaim discarded cards) or they might be little fish, or eggs, or cards that are already on your board, that you must cover up to show how one fish eats another. (You can't get these "eaten" cards back, but they will be worth points at the end of the game.)

Most cards will provide some addition benefit when played to your board. The card may allow you to play another card, add little fish tokens or eggs to your board, or may give you special benefits of additional points at the end of the game. There's a lot tied to this one action, but everything is spelled out on the cards, and everything is intuitive and thematic.

Some cards provide an ongoing benefit that is triggered each time the card is activated. That has to do with the column actions. Each of the three columns on your player board is associated with an action that you can take. The column powers allow you to draw cards, add egg tokens to some of your fish cards, hatch your fish eggs into little baby fish tokens, and move fish around to form schools. The strength of these actions depend on what fish you have discovered in that column. 

Your player board has different zones representing depths of water. There's a shallow region, a middle region, and a deep region. Each region has a special power that can be triggered when you activate its column, but only if your explorer has discovered at least one fish (placed one card) in that column's region. Your player board has one fish pre-printed in a different region of each of the three columns. So, at the start of the game, every column will do something even if you haven't placed any cards.

You'll want to place cards in unexplored regions to allow more actions to be triggered in each column. You'll also want to try to place fish that have ongoing actions on them that you can trigger that will compliment the actions that are already there. It's a little engine building puzzle that is quite satisfying, 

There's enough to think about to keep the game engaging, and I really enjoy it. Also, the fish cards all contain beautiful illustrations and fun fish facts about the specific fish featured on the card. I didn't know how much I liked fish, or how interesting they were before I played this game. Finspan is awesome!