Year: 2024 | Players: 2-10 | Min: 20 | Ages: 8+
This Landmarks 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 Landmarks?
Landmarks is a cooperative word association game in which one player provides one-word clues to help the rest of the group navigate a jungle filled with hidden dangers and treasures.
Landmarks was designed by Rodrigo Rego and Danilo Valente, and is published by Floodgate Games.
The game includes a Team vs. Team mode, but this review will focus on the main cooperative mode.
Rules Overview
In Landmarks, your group of explorers is lost in a jungle, and you need to find your way back to your camp. One player, known as the Pathfinder, holds the map and communicates with the rest of the group (the Party) via one-word clues. The Party must use these clues to navigate the island, avoid dangers, and find treasures while managing resources like water.
Round Structure
Give a Clue: The Pathfinder writes a one-word clue on a tile taken from the tracker board. The clue should relate to words/landmarks already discovered on the island and guide the Party to the space they want the Party to explore.
Place the Clue: The Party talks and decides which space the clue should be placed on the island. This placement determines where they’ll explore.
Explore the Island: The Pathfinder reveals what the Party discovered—whether it’s a treasure, curse, trap, water, or nothing—and possibly marks the effect on the tracker board.
Map Spaces
- Water – The Party needs to refill tiles on the tracker board, which are used for clues and also represent their health.
- Curses – If the Party encounters a curse, they need to find an amulet before they can escape. Two curses equals immediate death.
- Traps – These force the Party to permanently reduce their water limit.
- Amulets – These cure curses. An amulet allows the Party to ignore the first curse they find.
- Treasures – The Party needs to uncover treasures to win. You only need one to win, but the more treasure you get, the better you do.
Winning and Losing
Your team will win by finding one or more treasures and safely exiting the island (with no active curses). You’ll lose if you run out of water, exit the island with an active curse, or get two curses.
Team vs. Team Mode
In the Team vs. Team mode, two teams compete to find treasures on the island. Each team’s Pathfinder gives one-word clues to guide their group, and the first team to find four treasures without being cursed wins.
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Pros and Cons
Pros
- My favorite thing about Landmarks is that it has more strategy than the typical word game, especially when it comes to managing resources. As the Pathfinder, you’ll need to carefully time when to guide the Party to water spaces to maximize water gains and keep the team’s exploration going longer. It’s also sometimes a good move to direct the Party through traps and curses, which can open up better options for future turns. All of that stuff helps to make Landmarks feel like a unique co-op game.
- I wouldn’t call Landmarks a heavily thematic game, but it has more theme than most word games. The island setting and the whole idea of surviving while navigating dangers and treasures adds a nice bit of story that’s usually missing from this genre.
- There’s a good amount of tension while playing Landmarks, especially after you run into the traps and curses. You always feel that urgency, which is something I haven’t experienced in most other word games, especially ones that don’t have a real-time aspect.
- The game forces you to be very creative with your clues, and it’s fun to see how players interpret them differently. It often leads to some memorable moments when a clue initially stumps everyone.
- It’s great that there are easy and tougher map cards in the box. The easy cards are perfect for playing this as a family game or if you’re playing with new gamers, and the tougher cards are great for everyone else.
- I like that the map is double-sided. The more detailed side was a bit hard for us to see, so it was nice to have the option to switch to the simpler side for better visibility.
Cons
- As the clue-giver, it can be frustrating when your clue can fit multiple spots on the board. You can usually work around that with careful wording and/or timing, but sometimes the Party has to guess between two or three open spots. That can make some game outcomes feel a bit more random than I’d like.
- There can be some downtime for the Party while the Pathfinder is working on a clue. Downtime is pretty common in word games, but here I’ve found it to be a bigger issue, especially at higher player counts, since it’s the larger group waiting around rather than just one player. I definitely wouldn’t want to play this with more than five players.
- Within three games, the dry-erase marker’s eraser was smudging the ink around the tiles instead of fully erasing it.
Final Thoughts
I enjoyed Landmarks for what it is—a challenging word association game with a unique resource management twist. It brings a level of tension and strategy that you don’t typically find in this genre, but I don’t think it’ll crack my top 5 word games. It is a unique and fun game, but those first two Cons I listed really stood out to me and the people I played with and dropped it down a few pegs.
That said, Landmarks definitely has its moments and I’d never turn it down if other people wanted to play it. It probably won’t go into my main group’s regular rotation, but I can see it working well when I’m with people who want to play a thinkier light game.
If you’re a big fan of word games, chances are you’ll have a good time playing Landmarks. It’s a great fit for those who enjoy puzzling out clever clues together, and it’s especially solid as a three-player game.
Landmarks Links
BGG | Amazon | Miniature Market
Thanks for taking the time to read our Landmarks review!
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