Santorini

Twenty-two plastic building pieces, four of them domes, two worker pawns per player, and a board that unfolds into a five-by-five grid. It’s a good game and a bad choice for a pack, and I want to get that out front because it colors everything else I’ve got to say about it.

The rules are almost nothing. Move one worker to an adjacent space, then build a level on a space adjacent to that worker. Towers go up to three levels before you cap them with a dome, and the whole game is climbing a tower two levels higher than the space you’re standing on to win, or trapping your opponent so they can’t move at all. That’s it. No cards, no dice, no hidden information, just two players and a grid and the geometry of who’s boxing in whom. It plays two, up to four with the base rules, but two is where it’s sharpest, since with more players the board gets crowded and towers stop mattering as much as just staying out of the way.

I like the thinking in it. It’s closer to a chess variant than anything I’d usually call a board game, every move visible, every consequence calculable if you’re patient enough to calculate it, and I’ve sat with positions longer than I probably should admit, working out whether building here traps me two turns from now. That’s a good way to spend an hour on a slow smoke day.

What I don’t like, up here specifically, is the components. The building pieces are solid plastic, stack unevenly in a bag, and after one season of the pack getting thrown around on the trail I had two towers with visible white stress marks and a dome that had actually cracked. I superglued it and it’s fine, but it shouldn’t have needed gluing. A game this elegant deserves lighter, tougher pieces, cardboard tokens or something that stacks flat, not injection-molded plastic bricks that clack around and pick up scratches from every other thing rattling in the same pouch.

I’d still recommend it to someone who isn’t hauling it up a mountain. For someone who is, I’d say wrap the pieces individually or leave it at the trailhead cache and only bring it up for a planned two-player weekend, not as a regular carry. Good game, wrong packing list.