Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
At Gen Con 2024, the new game Landmarks seemed to pop up in the text chain with my gaming groups more than almost every other game during the weekend. The publisher of Landmarks, Floodgate Games (makers of hits such as Sagrada, Décorum, and Skyrockets), had a big party to kick off Gen Con with a special sale on Landmarks, and demo tables featuring the game were full constantly during the show.
The Floodgate team gave me the impression that Landmarks stood as the single biggest item Floodgate has ever distributed at a convention, in terms of unit sales.
So, we can start there: no matter what I think about the game, Landmarks made a major splash. I did a demo then got the game to the table during a recent family beach trip, and for the audiences I forced to the table (mostly a mix of casual gamers, ranging from ages 9 to 79), Landmarks is a good fit as a Codenames-adjacent word association experience that plays in about 20 minutes depending on player count.
The big takeaway from my five plays during beach week? Landmarks is a lot of fun with my family—as long as I don’t bring too many players!
Treasure Hunt
Landmarks is a word association game for 2+ players in cooperative mode or 4+ players in competitive mode. Regardless of the mode of play, someone (“The Pathfinder”) is tasked with giving clues to other members of their team to help guide the Party towards treasure and the exit on a dangerous jungle island. For reasons that can only make sense in a board game, a map is seeded with tiles that feature three separate single-word clues. Then the Pathfinder has to write clues on additional map tiles that will be placed in a way that will build a path towards an exit hex based on a secret map card that only the Pathfinder can reference.
Using the legend on the map card, some of the hex spaces are blank. Other spaces feature treasure, traps, curses, amulets, and water, with the latter providing a chance for the players to extend their journey by getting new blank tiles to use for their escape. The co-op map cards come in two flavors, beginner and regular, with a third type reserved for the team/competitive mode.
The magic of Landmarks comes when watching the Pathfinder work to build one-word clues that build off of existing words on the map. The Pathfinder will spend a few seconds writing down a clue, then giving the tile to the team to place adjacent to any other tile already on the map. “Smart…Codenames, the Board Game!” one friend said during my Gen Con demo, and I had to agree. If you’ve played Codenames or any other popular word association game that previously existed only as a card game, Landmarks simply and smartly takes that approach and turns it into an adventure game, albeit an adventure game so light on theme that Floodgate could have called it “Roosters”, “Cash Money” or “Word Game” and it still would have worked.
In a game with five family members, I had to guide the group towards the southern tip of the map by using words that started branching from the word “Castle” and required the use of clues such as “archer”, “sharp”, “arrow” and “bow” before I got to squeeze the group in-between two traps with the use of the word “wooden.” In another game with just my 10-year-old, we got tangled up a bit as we tried to navigate a series of starting words that included “Curling”, “Frown”, and “Village”, only to die in the wilderness after we failed to find water after our seventh clue.
Winning is as simple as finding the exit, although it seems like some players might get an especially warm feeling if they also find all the treasure icons listed on the map card. (My groups were pretty satisfied with just winning, instead of maxing out the treasure hunting.) On easy, you’ll win almost every time with a good Pathfinder at the helm, but on normal difficulty, we did find Landmarks to be a heftier game in terms of the tension, especially when the exit was farther away from the starting three tiles or the starting words were a bit more difficult.
Mostly Treasure, Occasionally a Curse
Landmarks is a good time at the table. I’m not about to throw my copies of Codenames or Wavelength in the dumpster—my groups feel that those prior titles are non-negotiable classics of the hobby—but the Landmarks angle I do enjoy is that the main format of the game is cooperative and some players really prefer their games friendly and non-competitive.
Landmarks can be taught in 60 seconds and the mix of co-op and team-based formats give it legs. Even though it was generally more fun to play Landmarks as the Pathfinder versus a Party member, I was surprised that being a Party member was still enjoyable. I think that was in part due to the fact that clues usually came quickly from my Pathfinders, so downtime for the Party was always minimal.
The main negative with Landmarks: player count. The larger the group, the more chefs in the kitchen…and my single six-player game took almost 30 minutes to wrap up. There’s just not enough going on in Landmarks to warrant a play taking this long (that was a co-op game), so for co-op, I’m sticking to a Party of one, maybe two other players, max. That makes Landmarks a 10-to-15 minute game on beginner mode and that felt right for a game of this weight.
I’m also not sure why there’s any treasure at all in the co-op format. I have found that players on both sides of the clue-giving process want to chart a direct path to the exit, as opposed to skulking around looking for treasure in the hopes that all three or four treasures can be found (based on map card difficulty) before beginning to search for the exit. Team mode does a better job of simulating the chase for treasure by removing the exit altogether, with the winning team being the one that finds all the goodies before their opponents do…so, in that format, a treasure hunt absolutely makes sense.
Landmarks does the trick as a family-weight wordplay game that is fun, quick, and variable thanks to the dozens of starting map cards included in the box. If your family or casual gaming group is looking for options beyond the benchmarks of this genre, Landmarks fits the bill!
Landmarks details
- Designer: Danilo Valente, Rodrigo Rego
- Artists: Aeron Ng
- Publishers: Floodgate Games, GateOnGames
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 2 - 10
- Age range : 8+
- Mechanism(s): Communication Limits, Cooperative Game
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.12729 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about Landmarks.
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