Year: 2023 | Players: 1-4 | Min: 30 | Ages: 8+
This Beacon Patrol review was made after playing the game seven times. The publisher sent us a copy of this game in exchange for an honest review.
What is Beacon Patrol?
Beacon Patrol is a cooperative tile-laying game where you take on the role of Coast Guard captains patrolling the North Sea, checking lighthouses and buoys as you explore the coastline.
Beacon Patrol was designed by Torben Ratzlaff and published by Pandasaurus Games.
Rules Overview
You are captains of the Coast Guard, responsible for patrolling the North Sea and ensuring the safety of its coast. Your job is to inspect lighthouses, beacon buoys, and other critical landmarks by exploring as much of the coastline as possible.
Throughout the game, you’ll take turns placing tiles, moving your ships, and sometimes swapping tiles with teammates. You’ll need to follow specific placement and movement rules, use limited movement tokens efficiently, and coordinate with your teammates to maximize your points.
Turn Structure
On your turn, you can take any of the following actions, in any order:
- Place Tiles: Place up to three tiles (or two with four players) adjacent to your current ship location. Tiles must be placed in the correct orientation, match all neighboring edges, and connect via water. Each time you place a tile, your ship moves onto it.
- Move Your Ship: Use movement tokens to move to an adjacent water-connected tile. Each move costs one token. You can also discard tiles, moving one space per discarded tile.
- Swap Tiles: You can trade one of your unplayed tiles for another player’s once per turn.
At the end of your turn, you discard any remaining tiles, draw new tiles, and reset all movement tokens.
Scoring
The game ends when all tiles have been used or discarded. You score points only for fully explored tiles, which are tiles surrounded on all four sides. Lighthouses are worth three points, beacon buoys are worth two, and all other explored tiles are worth one point.
Your final score determines your rank.
Expansion Tiles
Once you’re familiar with the base game, you can include one or both sets of mini-expansion tiles: Windmills and Piers. These add new tile types to the draw pile and introduce additional scoring rules.
Windmills: When fully explored, a Windmill tile scores one point plus one additional point for each adjacent open ocean tile. Open ocean tiles don’t have any land on them.
Piers: When fully explored, a Pier scores one point plus one additional point for each building on the land it’s connected to. The Pier must be fully explored, but the land itself does not need to be.
When using the expansions, the scoring thresholds for each rank increase. The rulebook has a scoring chart for the base game and the expansions.
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Pros and Cons
Pros
- The movement tokens make Beacon Patrol feel unique to me. Managing your movement each turn is a huge part of getting good scores, and it feels like a different type of skill you need to bring to the game. It’s often a good move to save one or more of those tokens so you can move into position for your next turn, which adds a bit more strategic depth than I expected.
- Like most tile placement games, Beacon Patrol is extremely smooth to play. There are only a couple of rules to remember, so turns move quickly and the 20–30 minutes fly by.
- There’s more cooperation in Beacon Patrol than in most other co-op tile-laying games. A big reason for that is the trading, which is a key part of getting a good score. You want to make sure you don’t play your tiles too quickly since there’s a good chance one of your tiles could be more helpful to a teammate.
- Adding on to the previous Pro, I think this may be the best four-player (light) tile-laying game I’ve played. I do think it’s best with two (quicker turns, more to do each game), but having more players to trade with increases the fun factor a tick.
- I really like the tile art. It’s nice and clean, and the final map looks great on the table once everything’s placed.
Cons
- There can be feel-bad moments when you’re stuck with land-heavy tiles that just won’t fit anywhere. This tends to come up more in two-player games when both players draw badly. It’s frustrating to have to discard those tiles.
- There’s basically zero tension in Beacon Patrol. That’s not a huge knock, though, since that’s pretty much always the case with lighter tile-laying games.
- Beacon Patrol doesn’t have low replay value, but I don’t know how often I’d play it after I get into the higher ranks. That’s an issue I have with most beat-your-high-score games.
Final Thoughts
Beacon Patrol is a little lighter than I usually go for, but it’s still a well-designed, relaxing co-op experience. It plays smoothly, looks great on the table, and manages to be both chill and satisfyingly puzzly at the same time.
If you’re a fan of light puzzle games, chances are you’ll get a kick out of Beacon Patrol. If you don’t like high-score types of games or you prefer heavier co-ops, you’ll want to pass on this one.
Dorfromantik is still my go-to tile-laying game, but Beacon Patrol will now be my go-to portable tile-laying game. I think it’ll go into the filler game rotation for a while, too.
Beacon Patrol will stay in my collection at least until we’re able to get near the top rank, which could take a while (we’ve only hit the middle ranks so far).
Beacon Patrol Links
BGG | Amazon | Miniature Market
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