My wife and I adore the National Parks in the United States. By my count we’ve visited around twenty of them, which isn’t even halfway towards visiting them all. Regardless, as big hikers and campers, nothing compares to the scale and beauty that our National Parks have to offer. It should be no surprise that I enjoy the original PARKS board game, featuring art from the Fifty-Nine Parks series, having played that installment at least a dozen times. However, Parks (Second Edition) takes the lessons learned from its predecessor in an attempt to become its own natural wonder
Parks (Second Edition) Overview
The general gameplay of Parks (Second Edition) mirrors the original. Players assume the role of hikers on a quest to visit the most National Parks. Along the way, you’ll be taking scenic photos to accrue the most points to become the biggest park enthusiast. .
Over the course of three seasons, players move one of their two hiker meeples forward along the Trail, performing the action at each Trail Site they land on. Most of the time this involves gaining resources, but it can also grant additional benefits in the form of Gear, Canteens, Photo opportunities, or visiting Parks. Being the first player to land on a Trail Site rewards additional resources representative of the weather experienced along the trail.
The Parks space allows players to reserve a Park from the market in hopes of visiting it in a future turn, or it allows a player to visit as many Parks as they can afford by spending their resources. Parks are the bread and butter for point gathering, but spending a resource to take a Photo also results in a victory point.
Gear exists to grant extra bonuses when landing on certain Trail Sites or taking certain actions. For example, Rain Gear grants two water resources whenever you spend one resource to take a photo. Braving the elements has its perks!
Canteens are completely reworked from the original. Now, each player has three rows of Canteen spaces on their Player Board with two spaces for Canteen Tokens each. Gaining a Canteen allows a player to choose from the available tokens and add it to their Player Board. When gaining a water resource, a player can spend that water resource on a row in their Canteen to gain the cumulative benefits of that entire row.
There’s also a new Trail Site that features a dice icon. When landing on that space, players get to roll the Trail Die and earn the associated rewards. This could be something simple like a single mountain resource, or something as valuable as a Canteen token. It may be random, but you generally do get a bit more bang for your buck if you compare it to a single water or sun resource, which I consider to be the most common and therefore least valuable.
The base game of Parks (Second Edition) also incorporates the Camping mechanics from the Nightfall expansion. Instead of taking a Trail Site action, a player can opt to go Camping on a Site that still has a tent available. In doing so, they forgo the traditional benefits of the Trail Site space, instead getting to choose one of the more powerful actions on the Campsite Tile.
Players also have Passions as individual objectives to work towards. Completing a Passion—such as having three water tokens on visited Parks—grants the choice between a Gear effect or an endgame bonus. Usually your choice is dependent on the timing of completing your Passion—completing one early gives more potential use out of the associated Gear, and finishing one late would almost always make it better to take the endgame bonus.
At the end of each Season, bonuses are awarded based on the Bonus tiles and at the end of the third season, the final scores are tabulated. Highest score wins.
Parks (Second Edition): Blazing a New Trail
The new and improved edition of Parks receives an eye-catching facelift, dropping the art from the Fifty-Nine Parks series in order to create a cohesive, thematic style throughout the entire project. While the original art turned heads in a big way there was obviously a disconnect between using those beautiful images for the Parks cards but resorting to minimalist design on basically every other component. The new art by Josh Emrich is arguably just as stunning while also dishing out heavy doses of road trip Americana with modern flair. I dig it.
Mechanically, the changes in the second edition are all positive. In the original, I never really found myself attracted to many of the Gear cards, but the benefits in the refresh are enticing—I’ll often buy at least two pieces of gear. This also enables a small engine-building element where you can chain Gear effects together where you might take a Photo, allowing you to convert a resource to a wildlife token, which might allow you to take a second Photo. And if you have the Shutterbug, that’s the potential for three Photos in a turn! It never gets too out of control because Gear can only be activated once per turn, so there’s a built-in failsafe.
My favorite adjustment in the game is that you can now visit as many Parks as you have the resources for with a single Parks action. In the past, you were limited to visiting one Park each time, constantly leaving me with the feeling that there weren’t enough Visit a Park actions in the game. The Reserve a Park action is also rolled up with the Visit a Park action, becoming a single Parks action. You can Reserve or Visit when you use that action, which is a massive improvement.
And then there are the Canteens. Oh, how I love the Canteens! The improved method of allowing three rows of Canteen actions and filling in your rows invites strategy into the conversation. If you earn a canteen early in the Season and you’ve claimed a row from filling already, do you fill in the other side knowing that you won’t get that benefit this Season? Or will you populate half of another row so that you could essentially swap water for that Canteen token’s resources later on? Having the ability to earn Parks actions through Canteens also alleviates the aforementioned problem with the first edition, removing the sparseness of Parks actions.
Parks (Second Edition) is available in a base version and a deluxe, Summit version. With the deluxe version of the game, you get double-layered boards, nylon bags for Canteen and Trail tiles, playmat, and screen-printed wildlife tokens. Production-wise, I am very impressed with the overall quality of the Summit version and how everything fits snugly within a single box.
From start to finish, I find nothing but praise for Parks (Second Edition). The game is a solid improvement over its predecessor across the board, especially since it actually features every single one of America’s wonderful National Parks. Parks (Second Edition) treads over familiar footprints while confidently stepping off the beaten path to blaze its own trail, firmly planting a flag at the summit of the board game hobby.
Parks (Second Edition) details
- Designer: Henry Audubon
- Artists: Josh Emrich
- Publishers: Feuerland Spiele, Games7Days, Keymaster Games
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 1 - 5
- Age range : 10+
- Time range : 30 - 60 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Contracts, End Game Bonuses, Events, Solo / Solitaire Game, Turn Order: Claim Action, Worker Placement
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.89982 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
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