Wouter & Ymke 
Some games want your attention right away. Big boards, piles of pieces, too many things happening at once. Lacuna isn’t one of those games. It’s quiet. Almost shy. And honestly, that’s part of why it works.
Lacuna is a two-player game about drawing invisible lines between flowers on a dark pond. You place pawns, collect pairs of flowers, and slowly close off space for yourself and your opponent. The goal isn’t to grab as much as possible, but to end up with control over more colors than the other player.
The name Lacuna means a gap or an empty space, and that idea shows up everywhere in the game. Most of the time you’re not staring at the pieces themselves, but at what’s between them. The empty areas. The lines that still work. And the ones that don’t anymore.
The game is strictly for two players and uses full information from the start. Nothing is hidden. All flowers are on the table from the beginning, and the game always follows the same structure. First, players take turns placing pawns. Then, whatever flowers are left get claimed automatically based on distance. Simple on paper, but not always simple in practice.
👥 2 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 20 minutes
📝 Designer: Mark Gerrits
🎨 Artwork: Nick Liefhebber
🏢 Publisher: SAVANA (review copy provided)
Gameplay overview
At setup, each player takes six pawns of a single colour. One player is chosen at random to start and immediately takes one flower of their choice and puts it aside. After that, all remaining flowers are poured onto the cloth mat. They can land anywhere in the central area, including on the blue waves. If something falls off, you just toss it back in.
You’re allowed to use your hands to spread the flowers around. And you probably should. A big clump in the middle doesn’t really help anyone. Once things look reasonably spread out, the game starts.
On your turn, you place one pawn. To do that, you pick two flowers of the same colour and check if you can draw an imaginary straight line between their centres. That line can’t be blocked by any other flower or by a pawn already on the mat. If the line is clear, you place your pawn anywhere along it, as long as the centre of the pawn stays on that line. Then you take the two flowers and add them to your own area.
The pawn doesn’t need to sit in the middle. It just needs to stay on the line. And you’re never allowed to move flowers or pawns to make space. If your pawn would push something, that placement just isn’t allowed. No fixing it. No “just a little bit”.
Sometimes a pawn can be placed where multiple valid lines cross. That’s allowed, but you still only take one pair of flowers. Two flowers per pawn, always. No exceptions.
Once a pawn is placed, it stays there for the rest of the game. Pawns block future lines in the same way flowers do, which means every move reduces the number of options left on the board. Players keep alternating turns until all twelve pawns are placed.
After that, the game shifts into its second phase. This part happens automatically. For every flower still on the mat, you look at which pawn is closest. The player with the nearest pawn takes that flower. If it’s not obvious, you talk it through and use the ruler if needed.
If a flower is exactly the same distance from both players’ closest pawns, you compare second-closest pawns, then third-closest, and so on until the tie is broken.
Scoring is based on colour majorities. If you have four or more flowers of a colour, you win that colour. To win the game, you need to win at least four colours. Total flower count doesn’t matter beyond that.
Artwork, components, and presentation
Lacuna comes in a tall, cylindrical box, which already sets it apart. It looks nice on a shelf, but to be fair, it’s not the easiest shape to store if your shelves are mostly made for square boxes.
Inside, the main component is the cloth mat. It’s dark, mostly black, with deep blue waves running across it. The flowers really stand out against it, and that contrast matters, because you’re constantly judging lines and distances. The fabric feels good on the table and keeps pieces from sliding around, which is important in a game like this.
The flower tokens are wooden, chunky, and easy to handle. There are seven colours, with seven flowers of each colour. Each flower has its own small white design in the centre. You don’t really notice that at first, but over time it helps distinguish individual pieces when you’re scanning the board.
The pawns are metallic, one set gold and one set silver. They have some weight to them, which helps them stay put. Visually, they fit the game well, but they do reflect light quite a bit. Depending on your table and lighting, that can sometimes make judging distances slightly harder, not easier.
There’s also a ruler included. It’s plain and does its job. You won’t use it often, but when you need it, you’re glad it’s there.
Overall, the presentation is strong and consistent. Everything serves the gameplay. That said, if you don’t like cloth mats or prefer rigid boards, this might already be a small downside for you.
Our experience
At the table, Lacuna felt calm, but not relaxed. There’s a lot of quiet thinking. Turns don’t take long, but they do feel heavy. Because everything is visible from the start, there’s nowhere to hide. Every pawn you place changes the game for both players, and you feel that immediately.
The first phase is tight. There are only twelve placements in the entire game, and that’s it. Every pawn scores two flowers, but it also blocks future possibilities. Most moves don’t just help you. They also change the board in ways your opponent can use later.
We kept coming back to intersection placements. Placing a pawn where multiple lines cross can be frustrating at first, because you’re clearly giving up potential points. But over time, those placements started to feel important. Blocking options and shaping the board sometimes mattered more than grabbing the “best” pair of flowers.
The second phase often changed how we looked back at earlier decisions. Pawns that felt slightly awkward when placed sometimes ended up claiming multiple flowers later on. And pawns that felt clever at the time didn’t always pay off. That retroactive scoring surprised us more than once.
Our thoughts
Let’s face it, Lacuna is not going to work for everyone. It’s abstract, quiet, and unforgiving. If you like games that give you room to recover from mistakes, this probably isn’t that.
What makes it interesting is how pawns do two jobs at once. They score immediately, but they also act as influence points for the end of the game. That overlap is where most of the depth comes from. You’re never just taking flowers. You’re also committing to a position.
The decision space is very narrow. With only six moves per player, there’s little room for long-term planning in the usual sense. You’re constantly balancing what helps now versus what might help later. The second phase rewards good positioning, but it doesn’t explain itself while you’re playing. You have to learn that part the hard way.
The scoring system pushes you to spread out across colours. Focusing too much on one colour rarely pays off. Once you have four flowers of a colour, collecting more doesn’t really help, which can feel a bit counterintuitive at first.
Skill in Lacuna comes less from understanding rules and more from reading space. New players often focus on any legal line they can see. That works, but it misses how important pawn placement is for the second phase. More experienced play is about influence, blocking, and predicting which flowers are likely to remain later.
At higher levels, blocking becomes very deliberate. Intersection placements, denying key lines, and placing pawns slightly off-centre to gain better proximity all start to matter. That’s where the game shines.
In the end, Lacuna is a small, focused two-player game with very clear ideas about what it wants to be. It doesn’t try to please everyone, and honestly, that’s probably its biggest strength and its biggest weakness.
📝 We received a copy of the game from SAVANA.
