From the rulebook:
“Welcome to Yellowstone Park, the home of many wild animals. Impressive geysers spray their hot fountains into the blue sky. The players go on a trip through the park, which is shown on the game board. Each player has a hand of animal cards with different colors and numbers. During the game the players try to put their cards down as skillfully as possible on the game board to avoid penalty points.”
Yellowstone Park is played on a 7×7 grid laid on top of an illustrated overhead view of the titular park. The rows are numbered from 1 to 7 in ascending order, starting from the lowest row and moving upwards. There is a score track running along the left side of the grid. Each player’s score marker begins at the number 5 spot on this track.
There is also a deck of 56 Animal cards. Each card is one of four colors (red, green, yellow, blue) and one of seven numbers (1 through 7). For each number, there are two copies of that number + color pair (two copies of green 1, for instance). Every card features a cartoonish image of an animal, but these illustrations are unimportant for the purposes of the gameplay.
On a player’s turn, they will place one to two cards from their hand onto the grid following two simple rules. First, a number must always be placed in the matching numbered row. Second, colors can be placed into any column. But, once a color has been placed into a column, only cards of the matching color can be placed into that column. If a player places a card which has already been placed, the new copy is placed on top of the old one.
During setup, the deck of cards is shuffled, each player is dealt six cards, and another card is drawn from the top of the deck and placed into its matching row in the center column.
Sounds pretty simple, right?
Well, this is an Uwe Rosenberg game. Nothing is ever that simple. That first card that was placed during setup is part of a 3×3 grid. But it’s up to the players to determine just where in that grid the card lies. As cards are placed around this card, the borders of the 3×3 area begin to flesh out. So, it isn’t necessary to place cards adjacent to one another.
If possible, each card a player places must be placed within that 3×3 area. If a player ever places a card outside of that area, then a new 3×3 area is formed around the card that was placed outside of it, and the player collects every card outside of this new 3×3 area and places it face down in front of them in a penalty pile. This concept is crucial to the gameplay and can take a few turns to really wrap your head around. If you’re teaching this game to new players, I highly recommend you play out a few sample turns before getting started.
At the end of a turn, players have a decision to make depending on how many cards they played and also whether their hand is empty. If a player only played a single card, they end their turn without drawing any more cards. If they played two but still have at least one card in their hand, they can opt to draw up to a hand size of six cards or skip drawing cards entirely. If their hand is completely empty at the end of their turn, they may draw a new hand of six cards from their pile of penalty cards (if there are at least six of them) or they draw six cards from the draw pile.
If a player ever goes to draw six cards from the draw pile and the draw pile empties during their draw, or is empty after their draw, the round ends and scoring is performed. Each player counts up the cards in their penalty pile and moves their scoring marker forward that many spaces on the score track. If a player should reach, or exceed, the 35 point mark, the game ends, and the winner is whoever’s scoring marker is closest to the zero.
And now that you understand how scoring works: If a player plays the penultimate card into a 3×3 grid, they receive one bonus negative point, moving their scoring marker backwards. If they place the final card into a 3×3 grid, they receive three bonus negative points. Thus, if a player manages to play both the penultimate card as well as the final card into the grid, they would receive a total of four bonus negative points.
Thoughts
Opening Yellowstone Park is a stark reminder that there was a time in modern boardgame history when presentation took a backseat to gameplay. Published by AMIGO in 2003, Yellowstone Park definitely shows its age.
For starters, it’s evident this game was produced at a time when publishers took a “one size fits all” approach to packaging. The insert for the game is thin and flimsy with recesses and slots for components that don’t exist. I suspect these trays were designed to accommodate a wide swath of different games, and they just slapped whichever one worked best into the box when it came time to produce the game.
The other components are not very impressive either. The cards are made from thin cardstock, and the illustrations on them are little better than clip art: serviceable, but nothing that’s going to be winning any awards. Were this game to be produced today, no doubt the main board would be quad-folded, fitting into a much smaller box. Instead of generic round wooden tokens, the score trackers would be custom crafted wooden animals (or something of the like). Much more care would be taken with the artwork, and the cards would all have a nice linen finish.
In short, Yellowstone Park isn’t much to look at. However, despite its lackluster presentation, Yellowstone Park is quite a clever game, especially if you’ve got a gift for counting cards.
At the start of the game, looking at your hand plus that starting card, you already know 1/8th of the cards that are in play. That doesn’t seem like much information at all, but it’s just enough for you to begin developing a strategy.
Do you start off by defining the corners of your grid with the intention of filling it in later? Or, maybe the best strategy is to start things off loose, laying down just a single card, to see where your opponents take things. At the end of round scoring, you’re only losing points for cards in your penalty pile, not cards in hand. So, there’s a lot to be said for intentionally losing early on, ditching cards from your hand that don’t go together well, knowing that you’ll be able to use your collected penalty cards as your hand later on. That only works, however, if you’re able to time things correctly. If you wait too long to pick up your penalty pile, you might wind up having to eat those negative points. So, maybe playing fast and loose with your penalty pile is not the way to go. If you’re not the first player, do you intentionally lose in the hopes that whoever went before you had grandiose designs on the grid and now you’ve thrown off their game? If you’re the first player, do you throw out a few cards in the hope that your opponents will intentionally eat penalties on the wrong assumption that they’re throwing off your game by placing their cards outside the grid?
For its seeming simplicity, Yellowstone Park is rife with these kinds of decisions, making it a shame that it’s not talked about more often. Despite Uwe Rosenberg’s name being on the box, I find it very difficult to convince anybody to play this game with me. But, without fail, once they grudgingly agree, a good time is had by all. There’s something to be said for elegant simplicity, complexity emerging from the gameplay and not the rulebook. Yellowstone Park has that in spades. If you’re an avid Uwe aficionado like me and you haven’t given this one a try, you really should. I think you’re going to like it.
