Wouter & Ymke 
In the early 18th century, naturalists were travelling, collecting plants and animals, exchanging letters and trying to make some sense of the living world around them. Carl von Linné became one of the most influential figures in that story, particularly through his work on classification. In 1732, he travelled more than 4,600 kilometres through Lapland, much of it on foot, documenting plants, animals, geology and Sámi culture. In Carl von Linné, we thankfully don’t have to walk quite that far. Instead, we collect specimens, study them, publish books, correspond with other scientists, grow flowers and send followers on voyages around the world.
This is another game in Pink Troubadour’s Pioneers of Science line, following Galileo Galilei. There is some family resemblance in the presentation too, as designer Michal Peichl also worked on the visual side of Galileo Galilei. This time we’re leaving the stars behind and looking much closer to home, sometimes literally through a magnifying glass. And while sorting plants and sending scientific letters may not sound like the start of a particularly competitive evening, there is rather more fighting over flowers than Carl probably had in mind.
👥 1-4 players, ages 13+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes/player
📝 Designers Michal Peichl
🎨 Artwork: Stanislava Pajonková & Michal Řezníček
🏢 Publisher: Pink Troubadour (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Carl von Linné is played over five rounds, with each player taking three turns per round. Your main actions are represented by lens tokens. On your turn, you choose an available lens and place it on one of the three instruments at your work table. The glasses perform the action once, the magnifier twice and the microscope three times. Each instrument also has its own benefit. The microscope, for example, lets you claim an available position in the next round’s turn order, though the lens placed there becomes unavailable to you during the following round.
Exploring moves your explorer around Scandinavia, where locations can provide resources, sketches and specimens. Specimens go into the library on your player board. Research then moves your researcher through this small grid, gaining the reward on the space entered and studying information on the corners of adjacent specimens. Fully researched specimens free up space in your library and score at the end of the game. The different types of knowledge you collect are mainly used to meet the requirements for publishing books.
Correspondence and the botanical garden provide two more areas to work on. A correspondence action lets you either acquire a letter or send up to two letters you’ve already collected. Sent letters are organised by colour, and adding another letter to a column can trigger rewards from earlier letters again. In the shared botanical garden, players place flowers into beds and increase their number of blooms. Once a bed is full, everyone who contributed receives its common reward, with points based on the blooms each player contributed. Beds that remain unfinished still score at the end.
Voyages take place outside Scandinavia. Each voyage card has a route for one of your ships, which advances one space whenever you sail and collects the reward shown there. Some spaces use a rotating rudder that changes their value between rounds. Voyages can also provide exotic specimens, which immediately give knowledge and can score additional points if their conditions are met. A completed voyage can be paired with a published book to provide income in later rounds.
Taxonomy provides upgraded lenses, giving you different effects to use during later rounds, and lectures move you along three university tracks. After taking your main action, you may publish one book if you meet its requirements and then check whether you’ve completed one of the shared achievements.
At the end of each round, turn order is updated, eligible voyage and publication pairs provide income, and the rudder rotates. After five rounds, final scoring includes researched and exotic specimens, botanical garden beds, sent letters and university tracks, alongside points and achievements collected during play.
Artwork & Components
There is a lot of Carl von Linné on the table. The central board combines the map, botanical garden, university tracks, correspondence and several other displays, with sizeable player areas sitting around it. Specimen cards, voyages, letters, books and tiles soon occupy whatever space remained. You’ll want a decent-sized table.
The natural-history illustrations are easily my favourite part of the presentation. Plants and animals are given plenty of room on their tiles, complete with their scientific names. That style continues across the map, specimen tiles and the rest of the game. The wooden explorers and ships are screen printed, and the large round lens tokens fit naturally onto the instruments on the player boards. Magnifying lenses and early microscopes were actually used by naturalists to examine the small details needed for classification, so these aren’t just thematic shapes stuck onto an action system.
Once flowers start filling the botanical garden, it becomes one of the more colourful parts of an otherwise fairly muted table. Personal areas get increasingly crowded with specimens, letters and other bits of research. The amount of information can make the game look busy, though. There are icons almost everywhere, and during our first plays we regularly had to search for a particular symbol. We found the iconography itself clear enough once we knew where everything was.
The insert holds a surprising amount of material neatly, though the fit is tight enough that sleeved cards may cause problems. We also played with the optional metal daler coins. They’re sold separately and aren’t needed, but the bronze and gold finishes suit the rest of the production. We did, inevitably, spend more time than necessary making little piles of them.
Our Experience
Fifteen turns isn’t much when the board keeps presenting you with things you want to do. During our first game, we kept treating those things as separate jobs. We explored because we wanted a specimen, researched because there was something waiting in the library and sent a letter because we happened to have one. At the same time there were voyages, flowers, lectures, books and achievements demanding attention. We tried to do too much and ended up with several projects that weren’t particularly useful to each other.
Our later games became more selective. Sometimes an entire part of the board received very little attention because it wasn’t helping with anything else we were doing. We also started spotting longer sequences between actions and rewards. One action could provide what we needed somewhere else, which then completed something we’d already been working towards. There were turns where somebody started resolving a fairly ordinary action and was still moving pieces and collecting things a minute later. That’s rather more entertaining when you’re the person doing it.
The microscope gave us some of our more awkward choices. Performing an action three times could be exactly what we needed, except that losing that lens for the next round left a gap we didn’t particularly want. Sometimes the turn-order position mattered more. Waiting could be equally annoying when somebody else reached an achievement before us and took the higher-scoring spot, or grabbed another opportunity we were aiming for. We were also paying more attention to each other than the personal player areas initially suggested. The botanical garden in particular stopped feeling like a friendly communal gardening project once somebody had invested heavily in a bed.
The final rounds have played quite differently from the opening ones. By then, upgraded lenses, income and everything already sitting in front of us give us more options for putting several effects together. The advanced characters changed things further once we were comfortable with the common systems. Linné’s personal taxonomy grid and Jeanne Baret’s journey around the world gave us different things to pay attention to without replacing the rest of the game.
Two and three players have been our preferred counts. Four adds more competition for shared areas, but it also means more waiting when somebody has several effects to resolve. Knowing the game better hasn’t removed that. If anything, having more possible sequences to consider can make experienced players slower. Our games have also tended to continue in conversation after the final scoring, usually with us comparing approaches or pointing to something we’d do differently next time.
Our Thoughts
Exploring, tracks, objectives, majorities and contracts are familiar eurogame ingredients, but Carl von Linné connects many of them through the scientific work you’re carrying out. Exploration provides specimens, specimens are researched for knowledge, and that knowledge can go towards publications. It gives a practical connection between the subject and what you’re doing with the pieces. Correspondence sits a little further away mechanically, and the botanical garden feels more like its own scoring system attached to everything around it.
There are points everywhere. Specimens score, flowers score, letters score, university tracks score, exotic specimens score and achievements add more. That makes it difficult at first to judge whether an impressive turn is actually a useful one. You can trigger a string of rewards and move several pieces without getting much closer to what you need. A much smaller action that secures an achievement or completes a particular scoring requirement can be worth more. We like having to make that distinction rather than simply trying to generate the longest possible chain.
The amount of information involved is also our main criticism. By rounds four and five, several possible sequences may be available before you’ve even chosen a lens. Icons, cards, tracks, objectives and scoring conditions are spread across a large table, and comparing all of those possibilities can slow the game down. The basic rules aren’t unusually difficult for a game of this weight, but players who want to calculate every possible outcome can make a round take quite a while.
I’m also curious about how varied the strategies will remain after considerably more play. The achievements change what people chase, and upgraded lenses can make certain actions more useful from one game to another. Publications have been particularly valuable in our games so far. We don’t yet know whether that’s simply how we’ve been playing or whether they’ll continue to occupy such an important place once everyone knows the game better.
For us, Carl von Linné has enough going on that I wouldn’t bring it out with players who prefer short turns or a board that’s easy to read at a glance. There’s little direct confrontation either, despite the competition over shared areas. What keeps us interested is having only fifteen main turns and continually finding different ways to use them. We haven’t reached the point where our games are following the same route, and there are already decisions from previous plays that I’d handle differently next time. I’m quite happy to keep experimenting with those for a while.
📝 We received a copy of Carl von Linné from Pink Troubadour.
