The Legend of Landlock is a game that I was initially fascinated by when I first started looking at designer games. We are talking about when I just had a copy of Fluxx and a couple Cheapass Hip Pocket games. Before I even had my own copy Catan or even any games in actual boxes.
Landlock attracted my attention for two reasons. First all, it had gnomes. Second, I really wanted to try out Carcassonne and it was the closest thing I could find to it.
Wow. That sentence is amazing.
To be fair, I was still getting a handle on ordering things online (man, does that make me sound old :D) and I hadn’t been to the good game store two counties over yet.
Still, we live in an age where bookstores and big box stores have multiple shelves of board games. There’s a lot you still have to go out of your way to find but there’s a lot more readily available and game stores are a lot more common. When I picked up Landlock, the nearest game store to me specialized in jigsaw puzzles and magic tricks.
Of course, within a year, I would become familiar with a half dozen online sites where I could order games. And conventions were amazing treasure hunts of items I couldn’t find anywhere else. Still, game stores that actually specialize in games is quite a thing when I stop and think about it.
In the end, as adorable as Landlock is, it came up short for me. It certainly couldn’t compare to Carcassonne (not that it’s expected to) We found that the rules for tussocks and bridges felt… clunky. Easy to understand but they felt like they had been shoved into the game.
Ironically, there are now free PnP games like Autumn or Micro Rome or Micropul that I think are better tile laying games than Landlock. Remembering Landlock isn’t remembering a tile laying game for kids. It’s realizing how many resources there are now.
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