Overparked Review – Lots of fun

Overparked takes the crowd favourite mechanism of trying to place tiles efficiently, and applies a theme I’ve not seen represented in a board game before. You play the role of omnipresent valets, trying to park cars, trucks, buses and motorcycles in your own personal parking lot (or car park, for those of us in the UK). It uses a great tile-selection mechanism to build a quick, clean, enjoyable game in the same vein of Isle of Cats, Patchwork, and Barenpark.

If you see the name Daryl Chow on the front of the box and think ‘That sounds familiar’, it might well be because you read my recent review of Come Sail Away, which Daryl was the co-designer of. I met and talked to Daryl at this year’s UK Games Expo, and when he told me that despite Overparked coming from his Origame label instead of the Saashi & Saashi branding, this was his own spritual successor to Come Sail Away. There’s not much in the way of crossover in terms of the game, but it was enough to steer me into buying the game without having even played it.

Along the right lines

Each player’s board shows an 8×8 grid of spaces, painted up to look like a parking lot. The biggest disconnect between this game and real life is that the lines to park between are just suggestions more than anything. You can park across the lines however you see fit, just like that tool in the Tesco car park with their new Range Rover. The only time the regions become important is when it comes to unlocking keys (I’ll come back to those) by completely filling each quadrant.

You choose whichever card or truck tiles you’ll place in each turn by playing a card from your hand. The card shows an arrangement of vehicles, so you take the tiles for them and plonk them somewhere on your board, obeying the arrangement. You can rotate them but – and this is different from a lot of other tile-placement games – you cannot flip them. Any tiles you can’t place go in the overparked part of your board, resulting in negative points if they’re there at the end of the game.

Overparked isn’t a game of just getting everything to fit, like Patchwork. There are a few other things you have to consider. Scoring works by giving you a VP for every square in your biggest group of each colour, so you’ll try to make sure reds are connected to reds, yellows are next to yellows, etc. The single-tile motorbikes are wild and count for all colours at the end of the game, which means clever placement can see them add to your totals for all the different colours.

On top of all of this, there are achievements up for grabs. Three objective cards are drawn before the game, rewarding tasks like filling the inner 16 squares, completing a row of nothing but cars, or completing a cross-board diagonal. There’s a race to be first to the objectives to get more points and the precious little motorbikes.

Vive la difference

At this part of the review, you might be wondering why you’d want to play it. Unless you’ve got a real thing for parking cars, I guess. It’s all very by-the-books and not very different from other games you’ve played. Overparked’s differences come in two forms: keys and a steering wheel.

You start the game with one key and unlock more with each quadrant you cover. During your turn you can do your valet parking bit to spend a key and drive any vehicle forwards or backwards in a straight line. There’s no space to turn, and you can’t crash through any other vehicles, but it gives you a liitle scope to improve your situation. It means you can take those cards with what looks like wildly inefficient layout options with a view to correcting them at a later date. You can even use them strategically.

Say, for example, you really want that objective for filling a complete diagonal on your board, but you’re worried it’s going to mess up your carefully planned colour blocks. No problemo! Do what you need to to get the objective claimed, then use keys to shift the cars, trucks and buses back to where you need them.

I mentioned a steering wheel too, and that cardboard steering wheel is the game’s centrepiece. It’s segmented into five colours, each matching a player colour. There are five vehicle cards surrounding the wheel, and when you’re the active player, you turn the wheel to point your matching colour at the card you want. You get the card, but you also force the other players’ hands into taking whichever cards their colours now neighbour.

Tricksy!

Final thoughts

It’s difficult to talk too much about Overparked, as ultimately it is a fairly lightweight tile-placement game. Fill in your board, match up colours, and do your best to score well. The theme of trying to manage a parking lot is there, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s nice to see someone go in a completely different direction, though, instead of going for the usual suspects like cutesy animals (Barenpark) or completely abstract (Project L).

I like the fact that Daryl saw fit to add in an advanced mode, too. It replaces the bog-standard brown trucks, which just need to be surrounded, with unique player-coloured trucks that each have special scoring conditions. It makes the game much more difficult to score well at, and I recommend you play this way once you’ve played the standard game a couple of times.

I’ve introduced Overparked to three separate groups since I bought it at UKGE, and it’s been a hit with each and every person who’s played it. It looks more complicated than it is, and it plays out nice and quickly, too. Even in a five-player game, you should be done in about half an hour. This is going to sound like an odd think to praise, but I really like the fact that the game is small. It’s in a box about the same length and width as the old Area rectangular boxes, but it’s only a few centimetres thick. In a hobby where keeping a game can boil down to whether you have the space to store it, this matters.

If you enjoy these tile games, Overparked is great, and different enough to warrant a space on your shelf.

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