Wouter & Ymke 
If you’ve ever imagined owning a cozy mountain hotel where everything runs perfectly, Lodge is here to gently ruin that dream. In the nicest way. It looks bright and welcoming, but underneath it’s a puzzle about space, timing, and guests who are… let’s say very specific about their preferences.
At first glance it feels light. Colorful rooms, cute guest tokens, ski lodge vibes. You think, yeah, this is going to be chill. A few turns later you realize the space you thought was flexible really isn’t. The game has that nice trick where it invites you in with warmth and then asks you to be more careful than you expected.
It’s not mean. It’s just… honest. Every placement sticks. You live with your decisions. Just like real renovation, but cheaper and with fewer permits.
👥 1-4 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 30-60 minutes
📝 Designer: Peter McPherson
🎨 Artwork: Leslie Herman
🏢 Publisher: PickPocket Games (prototype copy provided)
Gameplay overview
Lodge is about building a multi-floor hotel and filling it with guests who care a lot about colors and floors. Each player grows their own lodge using room and amenity tiles, while drafting from a shared market. Guests score by matching the right pair of adjacent rooms and, ideally, landing on their favorite floor, so the whole thing becomes a spatial puzzle built around adjacency and floor planning.
On your turn you must build either a room or an amenity. That part isn’t optional. After that you may place guests. The shared display means every tile you take changes what’s left for everyone else. You’re not attacking each other directly, but you’re definitely stepping on toes.
Rooms have strict placement rules. You take a tile from a specific row in the display and it has to go on that same floor in your lodge. It must touch an existing tile, and upper floors need support underneath. This sounds simple, but after a few turns your building starts locking itself into weird shapes. I guess that’s the moment you realize what the puzzle is asking from you.
Amenities follow the same structural rules but act as scoring goals. They reward certain patterns, color groupings, or layouts. Sometimes they line up naturally with what you’re already doing. Sometimes they tempt you into bad decisions. To be honest, we’ve chased amenities we absolutely shouldn’t have.
After building, you can place guests. You may place up to one from the display and up to one from your valet each turn. Both optional. A guest needs two adjacent matching rooms. They move into one of them, and that room stays occupied for the rest of the game. Each guest scores two points, and they prefer certain floors. Put them on the right floor and you get bonus points later.
The valet is basically a way to reserve a guest for later. When you place a guest from it, you refill it immediately from the display before the display refills from the bag. So it works like a small safety net. You can grab a guest you want and hold them until your lodge is ready.
The market keeps shifting. If a row ends up empty, or if every room showing is the same color, the display automatically resets. You tilt the tray, everything slides down, and new rooms refill the gaps from the bag. Players also get refresh tokens that let them clear a whole row on purpose if they want to reset part of the market.
The game ends when someone places at least twelve guests. Everyone finishes the round, then you score guests, floor bonuses, and amenities. Highest total wins. Your lodge probably looks like a strange abstract painting by the end, but it’s your strange abstract painting.
Artwork, components, and visual design
Important note: this was a prototype copy. Things may change.
The art is one of the first things people notice because it doesn’t look like typical board game illustration. The rooms use flat blocks of color and thick outlines, almost like printed posters. Each tile feels like a tiny cutaway scene from a dollhouse, with strong color contrast that keeps the game readable even when it fills up.
The guest tokens are acrylic and honestly just fun to handle. They make that little click sound in the bag when you shake them, and I’ll admit we did that more than necessary. The portraits are clear and readable. The colors and icons stand out, so you always know what a guest wants without double-checking.
Amenities look like small story snapshots of lodge life. Cafés, desks, facilities. They feel like spaces instead of abstract icons. Everything stays readable even late game, which matters because a cluttered puzzle game can get exhausting fast.
On the table the whole thing builds upward in a way that matches the theme. You see these vertical stacks forming and it actually looks like a growing hotel. Even in prototype form it already had presence without being oversized.
Our experience
The core hook is tight. Draft from a row, place on that floor, consume rooms with guests. Those constraints are easy to learn, but they box you in faster than you think. Early games were more about learning the structure than optimizing. We made mistakes, saw what they caused, and adjusted from there.
After a few plays the mindset changes. The game teaches itself a bit without adding new rules. You just see the structure more clearly. I like that kind of learning curve. It rewards familiarity instead of rule memorization.
The shared market means you’re always watching what others take, because it changes what’s left for you. There’s no direct attacking, but players definitely affect each other. When a row collapses it reshapes the puzzle for everyone. Refresh tokens act like small tactical nudges rather than huge swings. They give control without turning the game chaotic.
Guest placement is where most of the payoff comes from. Planning a turn where you place two guests at once feels great. You’ve been setting it up for three rounds and suddenly it works. Those moments stick.
That said, the market can stall. Sometimes the colors you need just refuse to appear and you spend a turn doing scaffolding work. It’s not broken, but some players will feel that friction more than others. Also, analytical groups can slow the game down. Every placement has consequences, and if someone wants to calculate everything, the pace drops. We felt that in one play where the energy dipped a bit.
The end of the game is always fun to look at though. Every lodge ends up with its own shape and logic. Some look efficient, some look chaotic, some look like they’d fail a safety inspection.
Our thoughts
Mechanically Lodge isn’t trying to reinvent anything. It’s tile drafting and pattern building, but with a very clear identity. The row-to-floor rule and guest consumption system lock together in a way that feels deliberate. The rules are short, visual, and easy to explain. New players understand the goal quickly.
Amenities add direction without taking over the game. They work best when they support your structure instead of dictating it. If you chase them blindly, your lodge falls apart. We’ve done that. It’s a learning experience.
One thing we liked is how the game rewards leaving flexibility. Because guests permanently fill rooms, you need to preserve adjacency options. Fill space too aggressively and you run out of legal placements even with empty tiles left. The valet helps smooth that planning by letting you store opportunities for later.
The shared market is the tempo driver. It creates friction without feeling random for the sake of randomness. Sometimes it’s annoying, to be honest. You want a color and it won’t show. But that annoyance is part of the adaptation puzzle. You don’t get to build in a vacuum.
Overall it feels like a puzzle that gets more interesting the more you play. It sits in a comfortable middle space where new players can jump in quickly, but repeat plays reward understanding the layout better. Familiarity helps, and each session feels a little more intentional than the last. There’s always another version of this lodge we want to try building.
📝 We received a prototype copy of Lodge from PickPocket Games.
If you want to try the game, you can play it on Board Game Arena.
