Santorini: Second Edition Game Review

I don’t know of many games that are more misleading than Santorini. That box, with its warm whites and cool blues. That beautiful and bold and fundamentally round art, the best Saturday morning cartoon that never existed. The spirited sculpts for the worker figurines, charming and full of life. Those building pieces, luminously white, peppered with the perfect amount of texture, of cracks and crevices, to say nothing of those beautifully contrasting blue domes. This is a masterclass in production design. Few games look as inviting as Santorini.

This soothing exterior, I want to be clear, is a lie. Santorini’s superlative presentation is a marvelous trap.

Up Ol' Mount Olympus

Under the hood, Santorini is a diamond-cut abstract design, a collection of no more than five or six rules—if we are being real sticklers about what constitutes a discreet rule—that add up to a great game. Every turn is the same: move, then build. That’s all you do.

Within that simple recipe, there’s quite a bit to chew on. In one sense, Santorini is a race, an Olympic…

The post Santorini: Second Edition Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.