Continue if you are looking for games like Lanterns: The Harvest Festival and are curious about what similar games to play next. The harvest is in, and the artisans are hard at work preparing for the upcoming festival. Decorate the palace lake with floating lanterns and compete to become the most honored artisan when the festival begins.
To determine this list we broke down Lanterns: The Harvest Festival to what it is. Lanterns is an abstract strategy game that surrounds hand management and personal grid pattern building. If you are looking for something similar, you have come to the right place. We took all this into consideration and came up with this list of the 5 board games like Lanterns: The Harvest Festival.
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#05 | Ingenious
Ingenious just makes the list of games like Lanterns because it is a top-notch game that falls into building point clusters with patterns of an ever-changing waterfall of tile options. The game is very simple but impossible to master because there are so many paths to victory. Ingenius locks you in to a more Domino like game, with groups of pieces forced together, so you do not have as much freedom but it does fit nicely into that abstract strategy category.
Players take turns placing colored domino-style tiles on a game board, scoring for each line of colored symbols that they enlarge. The trick, however, is that a player’s score is equal to their worst-scoring color, not their best, so they need to score for all colors instead of specializing in only one or two. The game includes 120 domino-style tiles, each consisting of two conjoined hexes; each hex has one of six colors in it. Each player has a rack with six tiles on it, placing one tile a turn. For 1 – 4 players, games run 45 minutes.
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#04 | Reef
Reef is another great title on the list of games like Lanterns that packages a simple yet robust hand management and pattern building abstract strategy game in a naturalistic calming backdrop. It is simple to learn but impossible to master. The theme here is all about the beautiful symmetry of managing one of the great communities of the sea.
You take on the role of a coral reef, carefully selecting colors and patterns in which to grow and expand. On each turn, players can choose to pick up a new card from a choice of four, or play a card that is already in hand. Each card provides two reef pieces and a pattern that scores points if the existing reef has it (after placing the two new pieces). Whoever has the most points when the reef pieces (or card deck) run out wins. For 2 – 4 players, games last roughly 30 – 45 minutes.
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#03 | Quadropolis
Quadropolis is a title on the list of games like Lanterns that kicks the intensity up a notch. It is that same hand management and pattern building game, and it is still in the medium intensity level, it just has a few more layers to be thinking about, making more predictions about what your opponents are going to do based on what they have in front of them.
Each player builds their own metropolis in Quadropolis, but they’re competing with one another for the shops, parks, public services and other structures to be placed in them. The game lasts four rounds, with each player laying out tiles on their personal grid. Each player has four architects numbered 1-4 and on a turn, places an architect next to a row or column in the grid. There is some crafty strategy here, but this Battleship like play is how you get things. This then solidifies things and changes everything for future rounds. For 2 – 4 players, games last 30 – 60 minutes.
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#02 | Qwirkle
Qwirkle is a lovely abstract strategy game that makes the list of games like Lanterns because of the unique pattern building system. Tiles have many traits and places that can be used, but it is up to you to think ahead and put together groupings that are going to give you the most options for big scoring opportunities while at the same time limiting your opponent.
You begin the game with six blocks. The start player places blocks of a single matching attribute (color or shape but not both) on the table. Thereafter, a player adds blocks adjacent to at least one previously played block. The blocks must all be played in a line and match, without duplicates, either the color or shape of the previous block. Players score one point for each block played plus all blocks adjacent. For 2 – 4 players, games last about 45 minutes.
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#01 | Arboretum
Arboretum takes the top spot on the list of board games like Lanterns because it is a simple and beautiful hand management and pattern building game. Collecting and placing tiles has a chess-like strategy, playing off what your opponent chooses and thinking many turns ahead. Like Lanterns, it also ties into an uplifting idea, in this instance the beauty of trees.
A main deck has different color cards, with each color featuring a different species of tree; each color has cards numbered 1 through 8, and the number of colors used depends on player count. Players start with a hand of 7 cards. On each turn, a player draws two cards (from the deck or the discard piles), plays a card on the table as part of their arboretum, then discards a card to their personal discard pile. When the deck is exhausted, players compare the cards that remain in their hands to determine who can score each color. For 2 – 4 players, games run about 30 minutes.
