Ripples on the Pond

There are moments in a game that make you grin from ear to ear. A clever mechanism, a great play, or a satisfying component. All these things can bring a child like glee to its players. For Lacuna that is in its setup. 

Lacuna from publisher CMYK, designer Mark Gerrit and artist Nick Liefhebber delights from the moment you open it up. Popping off the top of the tube, peeling open its inner lid, and pulling out its play cloth and pieces. 

The cloth feels smooth and luxurious. The wooden flowers are light, simple, and beautifully marked. The pawns you’ll use to play the game come in a little drawstring bag and are satisfyingly weighty. The tube is empty. You pour the flowers back in, sealing them inside with the lid that has a small hole in it. Shake them up inside the tube then pour them across the pond (cloth). Like rain on water. Satisfying. The pond is covered in beauty. 

The game itself is a breeze to teach and seems simple enough to think about. It is a game split in two. First part you take it in turns to place one of your six pawns on the surface of the pond. 

In doing so you place each one on a line between two matching flowers. You then collect those two flowers. As you and your opponent go back and forth, pawns land across the pawn. Flowers disappear from the surface.

Now the second part. From each pawn, control ripples out across the surface. The remaining flowers are divided up between the players based on their proximity to the pawns. The game encourages this to be a conversation between the players, but does provide a ruler to resolve disputes. 

Why are you doing this? You have 7 flower types and 7 of each type. Get 4 of a flower and that’s a point. Get 4 points, that’s a win. Then you get to scoop up all the flowers and make it rain all over again. 

Lacuna is one of those games that creeps up on you. It disarms you with charm and then draws you in with subtle strategy. 

When you place your pawnes you do so along an unblocked line between the two flowers. Your pawn counts as a blocking piece. Not only do you collect with each placement. You deny. 

Simultaneously you are playing an area control game. At the beginning of the game the areas you control feel chaotic, overgrown, unmanageable. As you place pawns your dominance is pruned back. The areas you thought you controlled were snatched away by a clever placement. The battleground becomes tighter with each placement more important than the last as your supply dwindles. 

All through this dance the game never loses any of its cozyness. Every placement of a pawn has physical and mechanical weight. They feel immensely satisfying as they clunk onto the mat. Each of the flowers has a colour and a pattern, making it accessible for those with colour vision deficiency. No consideration for accessibility and replayability has been overlooked. 

It would be easy to dismiss Lacuna as incidental. Sneer at the tagline ‘A cozy game of mystical symmetry’. A flimsy game with little to recommend it. It seems too light to engage. It isn’t. Almost every time I’ve played it I’ve played more than one game. Every game is different, yet familiar. The pattern of flowers provides challenges and opportunities. Then you put them back in the tube. Shake it up, smile, and make it rain. 

I bought Lacuna with my own money.

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