AQUA: Biodiversity in the oceans from SidekickGames / The OP Games

Aqua was the only game we rented from the Board Game Library at UKGE! We played multiple games at 2, 3 and 4 players with our family but stupidly forgot to take any proper photos.

In Aqua, players choose and lay coral tiles to build their own coral formations, attracting small and large animals. Points are scored by the animals you attract, the coral reefs you grow and the end of game goals (“ecosystems”) in play.

Our first impressions of Aqua:

• The theme and artwork are absolutely gorgeous, but that’s no surprise when the art is by Vincent Dutrait (and why we wanted to try this game in the first place).

• The rules are easy to follow (aside from one misunderstanding – see point below) but the game is surprisingly thinky. Laying and layering the right tiles in the right place, especially to attract the large marine animals, is a challenge.

• A number of coral tiles are randomly removed from the game depending on the player counts. Removing tiles this way can skew the tiles in play, which can then unfairly impact a player who goes with coral patterns that are no longer in the game (this isn’t unique to Aqua, games like Sagrada also risk this problem). In future I would try to remove tiles manually, to keep an equal distribution in play.

• We misunderstood one of the rules for creating habitats for small animals, and this seems to be a common mistake based on the clarification added to BoardGameGeek. Essentially, we were under the impression that the coral had to be an exact hexagon to play a small animal on it, but this isn’t the case. This would have made forming habitats for small animals (and subsequent large animals) slightly easier. The rule book could have been clearer on this.

• It’s purely aesthetic, but I really liked that the large animals are double sided and you can pick which ones to use. I wish you had the same option with the small animals.

• We liked that there’s a lot of end-of-game goals to choose from (24 in total). With 6 used in a game, each one linked to a random small animal, this gives a lot of scope to add variety to the game and affect how you strategise.

We loved this game, it’s beautiful but not just all about looks. Hopefully we’ll get to try it again soon!