Reef.

Emerson Matsuuchi has come on the gaming scene with a bang the last couple of years thanks to the trilogy of games under the Century banner, beginning with Century Spice Road, which is – and this is generally a compliment – a great game to try if you like Splendor. In between the release of Spice Road and the second Century game, Eastern Wonders, he also released a very light pattern-matching game called Reef, which is a fun trifle of a game that I think is a great game to play with younger kids or folks entirely new to gaming.

Reef’s setup and components are themselves quite simple. The game comes with coral pieces in four colors, and you use a fixed number depending on how many players are playing. Each player has a 4×4 board, and begins with one coral piece of each color, arranging the pieces as they wish on the four central spaces. There’s a deck of cards with two coral symbols on top and some sort of pattern on the bottom that you’ll try to match. You begin the game with two cards, dealt to you at random, and then there are three cards out on display.

On each turn, you may take a card from the center of the table, or play a card from your hand. If you play a card, you execute two steps: You take and place the two coral pieces shown on top, and then you can score if anything on your board matches the pattern shown on the bottom. You can stack coral pieces, but the only color on a stack that matters for matching purposes is the one on top – so you look at your board from the top down to determine if you’ve matched the pattern. Regular patterns can include anywhere from one to four spaces, and may require you to have one or more stacks of specific heights. For example, it might require you to have two stacks, diagonally adjacent to each other, of height two with purple coral on top. You can score a pattern multiple times, but each stack can only contribute to one pattern per turn. Although you could potentially score more for certain cards, across many plays we’ve found it’s extremely rare to score more than ten points for any of these cards. (I believe my daughter did so once, and that’s it so far.) There are a few special pattern cards that can score quite a bit more – they give you two points for each stack topped by color X adjacent to your tallest stack of color Y, which can get you up to 16 points (four orthogonally adjacent spaces, four diagonally adjacent spaces).

The cards are well-calibrated so that the colors shown on the top don’t contribute to the pattern on the bottom, which means few if any cards beyond the special pattern cards are objectively more valuable than the rest. There’s a bit of strategy involved in collecting cards that will allow you to build toward a pattern on a card you already have while also letting you score something for the patterns on the new cards, but you’re limited to the three shown on the table and those will often be less than helpful. (You can take the top card from the deck in a blind draw, but have to place one or more point tokens on the lowest-valued card on the market, which is probably a terrible move.) With a hand limit of four, you can’t do too much long-term planning, and you’ll regularly have to change your strategy because the cards don’t cooperate or an opponent took the card you wanted.

The game ends when the supply of any color of coral is exhausted or, less likely, the deck of cards is exhausted. At game-end, each player can then score every pattern on cards in their hand, but only once apiece, so saving cards to try to score more points has a bit of risk involved.

That’s all there is to Reef – if anything, it’s simpler than my very detailed explanation implies – and the game doesn’t vary in practice with the number of players. It plays in a half hour or so, with moves very short and your decisions quite limited in practice; you can put your two new coral pieces on any of the sixteen board spaces, but most of those will make no sense at any given time. The flip side is that the game itself is shallow, pun slightly intended; I don’t see any way to play this with a long-term strategy, so you’re just drifting along with the current, playing the best cards that become available to you. Even holding two or three high-value cards doesn’t make much sense because you can usually score those patterns no more than twice and you need to churn your cards to get the coral pieces you need.

Reef’s pattern-matching should work for pretty young kids – it’s color and number matching, and there is no text reading required whatsoever – with turns short enough to keep them occupied, and stacking the coral pieces is oddly satisfying. Each color has a unique shape as well in case any players are unable to distinguish certain colors. As a lightweight, filler game you can teach and play quickly, Reef works, but I don’t think it’s going to be in heavy rotation for us.