To say I’m a fan of publisher Floodgate Games’ output would be a bit of an overstatement, but they are on my radar and so far I have been quite fond of their output. 2022’s cooperative hourglass-turning Kites was a beautifully illustrated game about keeping kites up in the air. It looked gorgeous and charming, but for the enthusiastic gamer didn’t provide much replay value after 2-3 games. It’s 2023 follow up Skyrockets: Festival of Fire looked much darker but was a little bit more of a gamer’s game. The hourglass-turning action remained, but 30+ missions that mixed up the core game mechanism added a lot of variety to keep people interested for longer. Still, it always seemed like there were few of my friends that were enthusiastic about it, and I guess so was I. We would play it on occasion as a filler and enjoy it, but otherwise it would just sit there on the shelf.
Now in 2024, Floodgate Games brings us Landmarks, a word association treasure hunt played on a cloth map. The colourful production of course intrigued me, but I wouldn’t have thought I would come to like it as much as I do and that this was the one that people around me would actually request to play!
Setup
Landmarks is a word-association game which closest sibling is the mega hit Codenames. Similar to Codenames, the game begins by picking a clue-giver and drawing a random card showing the lay of the land that only the clue-giver can see. Here comes the first big difference: Landmarks can be played in both a 1-guides-many or team mode and thus functions perfectly fine with lower player counts. Let’s look at the 1-guides-many mode first.
The clue giver picks a random card (green for easier, yellow for more difficult setups) and props it up in a tiny plastic holder. They take three cardboard hex tiles and with a dry-erase pen write the three suggested starting words shown on the card, e.g. “chocolate”, “elevator”, “car” and place the hex tiles on the indicated locations on the map. Finally, they take another 7 empty hex tiles and place them on a small board by their side that shows the varies things that can be found on the island: treasures, traps, curses, and so on. That’s it, the game can begin.
The Turn
The goal of the game is for all players collectively to find 3 (or in hard mode 4) treasures and then leave the island via the exit location. However, there are also traps and curses the players need to avoid, all of which only the clue giver can see. Each turn, the clue giver writes a single word on a hex tile, passes it to the other players, and that’s it. One word, that’s all the means of communication they have!
The other players then deliberate what location on the map is meant with that word. It has to be a hex adjacent to an already placed word, but where? Here comes the word-association aspect into play. If the existing words are chocolate, elevator, and car as mentioned above, “machine” would likely be right between elevator and car while “gas” on the other hand would be somewhere near car and away from the other words. But what about “carriage”? Close to car but a little bit towards elevator …?
Once the group has made their choice, they place the hex on the map and the clue-giver announces what they have stumbled into by crossing it off on the side board: if they’ve found one of the treasures, great, that’s one down. If they land on the exit, that ends the game, and the number of treasures found indicates how well they did.
A curse prevents players from exiting the island but there’s an amulet that can negate one curse. Then there are traps which cost the team a clue. Remember how I said that 7 hex tiles are placed on the clue giver’s board during setup? This is the team’s water pouch, basically their health. Every guess, no matter what type of hex is discovered, costs the team one hex and if they run out, game over. There are water hexes that refill the team’s water pouch back up to 7, giving them more reach. But if they run into a trap, they not only lose an extra hex but cut the water pouch permanently short by one.
That’s it. You now know all that’s needed to play Landmarks. There are no rules on what associations to make, that all comes from the group dynamic. Sometimes you have weird stuff, sometimes you have straight forward ones, whatever gets the group to place that hex in the right location. In one of my plays, we had a whole section of the map just filled with fruits or other stuff that one could put into gin. During the next, there was definitely a school vibe that for some reason led from board to chalk, to having a nice hand writing (which is a single word in German: “Schönschrift”) to models as in super models.
Team Mode
In team mode, both teams use the same map card, drawn randomly from a red deck. The aspect of a limited water pouch, traps, and water hexes is removed. Instead, there are now 4 dedicated treasures for each team (blue for the blue team, green for the green team) and 2 general ones (yellow) that can be picked up by both teams. Teams take turns where their clue-giver tries to give them hints that score them their own or neutral treasures while avoiding curses and opposing team’s treasures. So in familiar Codenames-fashion, a bad clue can lead to a team actually scoring for the other side. There also no longer is an exit. First team to gather 4 treasures – either of their color or neutral ones – wins.
Curses also work the same as before. As long as a team has more curses than amulets, they cannot win. The team that goes second gets one amulet from the get go and there is only a single amulet hidden on the map. So it’s a valid strategy for the second team to win the game by first snatching up the second amulet and then basically playing it safe until the other team runs into a curse. With no more amulets to go for, they automatically lose the game.
Conclusion
As you may have noticed, Landmarks has a very simple rule set, but it works. The best thing about Landmarks – besides its nice production and theme of finding treasure – is its lower barrier for entry. Whenever I taught Codenames to new players, there was the inevitable “wait, what? How does this work?” where anyone immediately seems to get the rules of Landmarks. I also had multiple groups play Codenames where the game basically ground to a halt because a clue-giver was struggling to come up with anything that would be better than 2-of-something. They felt bad, the rest of the group started making polite conversation to pass the time and that made it even harder for the clue giver to concentrate and come up with something good.
In contrast, anyone can come up with one word. Sure, it might not be the best clue ever, but you’ll be able to keep the ball rolling and keep up the flow. And even if you do come up with the greatest clue ever, your co-players will surely come up with associations and reasonings that go in a completely different direction than you were thinking of, and laughter ensues. Much more than Codenames, Landmarks invites players to make mistakes and say “ah to hell with it, let’s try this”. What also helps is the sheer impossibility of some of the moves, especially during first plays. Trying to come up with a clue that only touches one side is tricky, trying to find another one that continues in the same direction is even harder, but one that does a 60 degree turn is often next to impossible. With practice though, teams get better and if not, it doesn’t seem to be much of a problem either.
Another reason I prefer Landmarks to Codenames is that it works well with two players. I can’t really think of another word association game I enjoy with less than four or six players. Landmarks plays really nicely as a simple end-of-the-night game for two and if things go badly, one can always blame the particular map configuration one has drawn. Circling around traps, not running out of water, avoiding curses, there are plenty of challenges even for people that are good with word association games.
For me though, the team mode is the real star of the game, despite it only being covered towards the back of the rules. There are many benefits to this mode: As clue-giver, you have someone else that witnesses how your brilliant clue is misinterpreted in the most agonising ways and suffers with you. If your team isn’t inadvertently running into a curse or stepping onto one of the opposing team’s treasures, they are wasting time and might bring the other team closer to victory. And while one team is guessing, the other clue-giver often already has time to come up with their next clue, keeping the pace up. It’s also worth mentioning that I rarely in a team game have seen virtually everyone engaged in the game all the time. Everybody has an opinion on a single word and a perfect reasonable theory why it should be in one place or the other.
So it plays well with lower player counts, plays well with small groups, plays well with large groups. The cloth map looks great and there is even a simplified, more abstract version on the back. There is much to like here, but there are also some small caveats: we for example had to house rule that any word a team uses during reasoning (e.g. “if he would have wanted to get us there, he would have used ‘banana'”) cannot be used as a clue later on. Or how sometimes even the easier green cards are already super challenging when at other times they are quite doable. With the red team-vs-team cards on the other hand, there were some cards we found clearly benefitted one team over the other … at least on first sight. When we played go those, often the team we initially had assumed had a disadvantage won for some reason. And of course players have to at least have some interest in word-association games, which isn’t everybody’s favourite genre to put it mildly. An optional sand timer to limit the clue giver also would have been a nice throw-in but we didn’t miss it really.
To sum it up, Landmarks is a fun game and a keeper for me. I like how it plays, I like the theme, I like the cloth map, and it has a very reasonable price as well. So far, everyone I played it with had a great time, which counts for a lot in my book. My prediction though is that Landmarks will come nowhere near Codenames’ level of success, mostly because it comes years after Codenames’ release and millions of copies of it have already been sold. Codenames has become a classic of the hobby by now, beloved by many, and there will be few that are interested in another game that is so similar to it. For me though, I never quite enjoyed Codenames. It was good for the occasional play remotely with some colleagues (thanks to its excellent online implementation) but never something I actively sought out. Landmarks though, I do quite enjoy!