Who wouldn’t want to open their own theme park? In Wishland, players invest in rides and restaurants, hire actors and mascots, and open hotels, with just one goal: to build the most successful theme park of all!
1-4 players
75 minutes
Designer: Carlos Michán Amado
Artists: Fran Fdez, Philipp Ach
Publisher: Lost Games
https://lostgamesent.com/
Wishland is a worker placement game: during the course of the game, players will have the option to either send their workers to various spots on the game board, or to collect all workers back from the board to use them again in their next turn.
The main area of the board is the marketplace: most of the time, players will send their workers here to acquire new attractions, infrastructure or staff cards for their park, which can earn them additional income, direct rewards or points at the end of the game. Each type of card has its own action space in the marketplace, and when players place their workers here, they must pay one extra worker for every other group of workers already in that space.
-> Timing is thus very important as when collecting your workers back from the board, you may open up just enough space for your opponents to be able to send their workers, and you might want to avoid that.
Another option is to send one of your workers to the advertisement space to claim 1 credit, and one of the following bonuses: 1 worker, 1 happiness, or 1 visitor; those last two are tracks where you can get extra points or money by progressing. In addition, there are achievements to be made, which give players extra points if they are the first in the game to meet a certain condition.
I just love the theme, building attractions and restaurants in my own amusement park? You can totally count me in on this! In Wishland we see this theme for the first time in a medium weight eurogame and it totally works. The worker placement and set collection this game has to offer isn’t really unique and most of the mechanics we’ve already encountered when playing other games, but the combination really feels solid and everything works together smoothly.
The quality of the components is great, with silk screened wooden tokens and metal coins. I really love the artwork on the cards, they’re a bit on the small side but this didn’t bother the gameplay itself, I only feel this doesn’t do full justice to the beautiful artwork they show.
Overall I really enjoyed playing this one, it even might replace Unfair as my favourite theme park game!
Tabletopping 