Tabletop Tuesday — 25th Century Games’s Color Field

As I mentioned two weeks ago and last week, this year I backed the kickstarter on a trio of games from 25th Century Games which we’ve since had the opportunity to play a couple of times. They’ve all got something pretty cool going for them—not the least of which being they’ve lived up to their “20-40 minutes” playtime—and while last two weeks we were talking donuts and umbrellas, this week we’re painting an abstract masterpiece. Or, okay, we’re mushing paint around on a canvas.

Turquoise, Coral, Lemon, and Navy Don’t get excited, you will not be mixing coral with lemon to make tangerine.

The basic concept behind Color Field is pretty simple: you’re an artist, you’re painting an abstract, and you are using four colours to do this: turquoise, coral, lemon, and navy—and you are not mixing them to make any other colours, to be clear. Just blobs of absolutely not light blue, pink, yellow or dark blue, but—I must stress this—turquoise, coral, lemon, and navy. Because we’re artists here.

Okay, but for real, we constantly forgot what the colours were called and it didn’t matter, even though all the cards refer to them by those names. It’s cool.

Each player gets a canvas (which has space for a 2×3 grid of tiles) and already has colours painted all around the edges, and you set up “starting” tiles at random on your canvas, and then you take three rounds drawing tiles from three different stacks (one for each round) while building up your painting. When you choose a tile, you have a choice between three that are face-up on a palette, or a blind draw, and you can swap what you draw with one of the six tiles on your board, and you can place a newly drawn tile in any direction you want, which is the key thing, as you want to match the blobs of up to four colours against as many of the neighbouring tiles and the border of the canvas itself as you can.

You score points for matching edges at the end of each of the three rounds, as well as points for the longest streak of a particular colour, and also there are cards that randomize some of the rules or scoring each game or round for replayability. Between each round, there’s also a bit of a rubber-banding in place—the people with the most points reset more of their board than the people lagging behind as you move to the next round, so they can choose to give themselves got a bit of a head-start or just keep a tile or two that’ll be useful where it is. We found that an extra wrinkle in the strategy that was welcome: getting a lead way out in front isn’t always the best choice for the later game.

There’s also a mechanic called “inspiration” where up to three times in any given game you can spend one of your inspiration tokens to rotate/swap/move some tiles to adjust your painting, but that’s about it. Each turn you’re drawing a tile, swapping it with one on your canvas, and trying to create a better number of matches for higher points (with an eye on any goal cards that’ll adjust what scores better in any given game).

Much like Águeda: City of Umbrellas, this one doesn’t feel as “versus” as a lot of other games, with the exception that everyone is drawing from three face-up tiles, which means sometimes it’s possible the best move for you is to stymy someone else’s tile that would be great for them, but honestly it felt to us like most of the time, you’re trying to do what’s best for your painting, not complicating what another artist is doing with their yellow, say.

Sorry, I mean lemon. Lemon. Ahem.

It’s fun, but of the three games I backed and we’ve played, this one definitely goes longer than the other two in our experience, because tile selection involves a lot of “hrm, what if I put it here, wait, no, if I rotate it and put it here? Oh, no, that’s not quite right… hang on…” time, which is fine, but I can’t imagine anyone actually finishing a game in 20 minutes unless they’ve got some serious mental imaging abilities. Even though you’re literally limited by the number of draws you take each round and are only making a certain number of decisions, 20 minutes seems really, really unlikely to me, especially if you’ve got more than two players.

As with Águeda: City of Umbrellas and Donut Shop, we got the deluxe edition of Color Field, and the only additions there are some complexity-increasing cards, and wooden tokens for the inspiration tracking, both of which are fine. To be honest, we’ve yet to really play with much of the community cards because just rotating the tiles and keeping track of the basics is enough, and those cards do thinks like making one of the four colours “wild” for scoring matches and if I can’t remember it’s lemon instead of yellow, I really don’t trust myself to remember all the lemon blobs are actually whatever colour I want them to be.