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“Pura Vida” means “pure life”, and in Costa Rica the phrase is closely connected to the country’s way of life and relationship with nature. That makes it a fitting name for a game filled with rainforests, mangroves, volcanoes, savannahs and coastlines, along with toucans, sloths, snakes, butterflies and red-eyed tree frogs. As rangers, we’re trying to build national parks where those animals and habitats create the right kind of biodiversity.
That sounds rather peaceful, and visually it certainly is. The actual puzzle is a little less relaxed. Every animal tile has rules about how it can enter your park, the tiles you want are shared with everyone else, and adding the wrong animal can ruin a line that was scoring perfectly well before. Apparently managing a national park involves rather more spatial planning than I expected.
👥 2-4 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designers: Carsten Rohlfs & Ralf zur Linde
🎨 Artwork: Christine Alcouffe
🏢 Publisher: Piatnik (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Pura Vida is a tile-placement game for two to four players. Every tile combines one of five animals with one of five habitats, so there are always two characteristics to consider. Everyone begins with one random tile as the start of their national park, while 12 face-up tiles are placed along a shared path on the central board.
Each player has a ranger on that path. On your turn, you can move your ranger clockwise to any available tile ahead of you, take that tile and place your ranger on the empty space. You’re allowed to skip several tiles to reach the one you want, but once you’ve passed something, you can’t go backwards for it during that round. Taking the tile farther ahead may give you exactly what you need, but it also means giving up everything you just walked past.
Instead of taking a tile, you can rest. Your ranger returns to the starting area and you take no more actions that round. The first player to rest takes the first starting position for the next round, followed by everyone else in the order they return. Staying out longer gives you more opportunities to collect tiles, while stopping earlier means you’ll get an earlier choice from the new selection next round.
Whenever you take a tile, you add it orthogonally next to something already in your park. The arrows printed on the tile determine how it can enter. A right-pointing arrow, for example, means that tile must come in from the left side of your park. Tiles always enter from the outside and can’t be rotated. Some have more than one arrow, in which case you can choose which direction to use. Your park can spread out quite far, but you can never create a continuous horizontal or vertical line longer than five tiles.
Scoring comes from biodiversity. Lines of three, four or five tiles can score in three different ways: different animals sharing the same habitat, the same animal appearing across different habitats, or different animals appearing in different habitats. The first two combinations are worth 2/2/3 points for groups of three, four or five, while the last scores 1/1/2 points. A tile can score both horizontally and vertically when it completes suitable groups in both directions.
There’s one important detail here. You have to consider every directly connected tile in the line when checking whether it scores. You can’t select the three butterflies that happen to work and politely ignore the snake next to them.
Once everyone has rested, any remaining tiles are removed and 12 new ones are placed on the path. When someone reaches or passes 20 points, every other player gets exactly one final action. The highest score wins, with fewer tiles in your park breaking a tie. The game can also end if there aren’t enough tiles left to completely refill the path.
Artwork & Components
Pura Vida looks pretty much how you’d expect a colourful game about Costa Rican wildlife to look. There are plenty of greens, blues and sandy colours, with the central board showing a landscape of forest, water and volcanoes. The illustrations have a soft painted style that carries across the box, board and tiles.
Most of what you’ll actually be looking at during the game are the 75 animal tiles. Each combines an animal with a habitat, and the differences are clear enough that we rarely had trouble reading our parks once they started growing. The arrows are small but visible, which is important because you’ll be checking them constantly. By the end, the individual parks become irregular mosaics of animals and landscapes. Some look more organised than others. Ours definitely weren’t all examples of responsible national park planning.
Each player gets a wooden ranger in their colour, together with a simple wooden score token. Moving an actual ranger around the path feels nicer than pushing a generic pawn, and they give the shared board a bit more character while everyone’s parks spread out around it.
Overall, the production is straightforward. Nothing particularly surprised us when we opened the box, but everything is readable and the different animals and habitats remain easy to recognise once the table fills up. I also like how the finished parks look at the end of a game. They’re usually slightly strange, irregular collections of wildlife, but then ours have rarely been built according to any sensible planning regulations.
Our Experience
Our first games of Pura Vida moved quickly, mostly because turns are short and there’s very little to do between choosing a tile and putting it into your park. We understood the basic scoring without much trouble. What we didn’t understand quite as quickly was how much attention we should be paying to the arrows. At first, we’d spot the animal and habitat combination we wanted, move towards it and only then look properly at how the tile could enter our park. This resulted in several moments where someone picked up what looked like the perfect tile, stared at their park for a while and eventually admitted there wasn’t actually anywhere useful to put it. We knew the rule. We just kept treating the arrow as tomorrow’s problem.
That changed after a few games. We started looking at the shape of our parks before getting too excited about anything on the path. Open sides suddenly mattered, as did leaving several possible places where future tiles could enter. Sometimes an extension that looked slightly awkward was actually useful because it kept another part of the park accessible. Other times we’d close something off without noticing and discover two turns later that the exact tile we wanted could no longer reach the place we had saved for it. I liked that progression because the game hadn’t introduced any new rules. We had simply stopped looking at each placement as an isolated decision.
Scoring caught us out in a similar way. Early on, we were happy whenever we completed a group and tended to assume that making it longer would be even better. That isn’t necessarily the case, as one badly chosen addition can leave the entire connected line scoring nothing. After being caught by that a couple of times, we became more interested in whether a line could keep growing without breaking. Intersections also became much more attractive. Getting one tile to contribute horizontally and vertically feels particularly good, and we started deliberately leaving spaces where that might happen later. Of course, sometimes the required tile never appeared and our carefully prepared intersection remained an impressive monument to optimism.
The shared path produced more interaction than we expected from looking at the individual parks. We were regularly checking what somebody else needed before moving our ranger, especially when two useful tiles were sitting close together. There were definitely occasions where we took something partly because another player wanted it, but doing that purely to be annoying rarely made much sense. You still have to use the tile yourself, so stealing somebody’s perfect frog and then having nowhere sensible to put it is a fairly hollow victory. Resting caused similar discussions. I was usually tempted by one more tile, while others were happier to stop and secure an earlier position next round. Near 20 points this mattered even more because reaching 20 doesn’t immediately guarantee anything. Everyone else still gets one action, so we had a few endings where somebody crossed the line and then had to watch the rest of us try to pass them.
With fewer players, we could read the path more easily, keep an eye on what the other person needed and make a reasonable guess about what might still be available when our turn came back around. With more players, more tiles disappeared between turns and we had to adjust more often. That made the table busier and gave us more reasons to watch everyone else, but it also reduced how far ahead we felt comfortable planning. We preferred it when we could think about the next couple of placements while still having another player interfere with those plans, rather than simply seeing what survived until our ranger came around again.
Our Thoughts
For us, Pura Vida is mainly a game about dealing with restrictions, and that’s what separates it from many of the other light tile-laying games we’ve played. The two characteristics on each tile may remind you of Qwirkle, building a personal landscape from shared nature tiles naturally brings Cascadia to mind, and creating a layout that can gradually box you in has something in common with Calico. What changes the puzzle here is that finding the tile you want is only part of the problem. Your park also has to remain capable of receiving it.
The arrows aren’t usually the problem by themselves. It’s everything else you have to consider because of them. Moving farther around the path might secure the animal and habitat you need, but it removes other options for that round. Expanding in one direction can help a scoring line while making another part of the park harder to reach. Continuing to collect tiles gives you more material to work with, while resting changes where you’ll begin next round. Put those restrictions together and we regularly found that the tile we initially wanted wasn’t necessarily the one we eventually chose. Without the arrows, I think we’d mostly be collecting useful animal and habitat combinations and placing them wherever they scored. Here, the physical shape of the park keeps getting in the way.
Those restrictions are much less satisfying when the tile supply, rather than our own park, is responsible for them. If I’ve closed an entrance that I really should have kept available, that’s on me. If I’ve built around a particular animal or habitat and the necessary tiles simply don’t appear, there isn’t much I could have done differently. Competition on the path also adds uncertainty, particularly with more players. Because of that, we see Pura Vida as much more tactical than strategic. You can plan ahead, but trying to force one specific approach is risky. Keeping several scoring possibilities available generally gives you more to work with when the tile supply refuses to cooperate.
After several games, we ended up enjoying Pura Vida more than we did after the first one. Not because it suddenly revealed some completely different game underneath, but because we understood better what it was asking us to pay attention to. Once we stopped chasing the most obvious animal and habitat combinations and started treating the shape of the park as part of the puzzle, our choices became more interesting and our mistakes became much easier to blame on ourselves.
I don’t expect Pura Vida to keep showing us completely new things after dozens of games, but that’s also not really what we want from it. We’ve enjoyed figuring out how much those little arrows change the way we build, and there’s something satisfying about reaching the end and looking at a park that somehow still works. I can definitely see us bringing it back to the table when we want some tile-laying without turning the evening into a much bigger project. And hopefully next time I’ll remember to check the arrow before getting excited about the frog.
📝 We received a copy of Pura Vida from Piatnik.
