Base price: $20.
2 – 4 players.
Play time: 15 – 20 minutes.
BGG Link
Pre-order from Hachette!
Logged plays: 2 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Panorama was provided by Hachette Boardgames / Le Scorpion Masqué.

Just as I finally get out from under the boot of being behind on reviews, as I always am, I end up going on a trip that knocks me out of town for half a week. You know what that means? No reviewing gets done whatsoever, so I’m behind again. I’m sure it was worth it, but as of writing I haven’t actually gone on the trip yet, so you’ll likely have to wait until nxt week to see how things went at the Pokemon Fossil Museum if you’re keeping up with my life through the little vignettes of oversharing I do before each review. I find it calming to write about whatever I feel like before we get into it, honestly. That said, there was a bit of fun today because my friend told me she got engaged, and it happened on a hot air balloon, which seems like the right segue for this hot air balloon-themed game, Panorama! It’s another Scorpion Masqué game, so, let’s get excited for that.

In Panorama, you’ve got a great time ahead! You can spend the day in your hot air balloon just enjoying the sights and scenery. You only have so much time, though, before the day ends, so try to assemble the most scenic panorama possible! There’s a lot to that! You can’t just look at flowers; you have to find animals that fit within the terrain. There’s also objectives to consider! Do you want to see beautiful skies or long rivers or just a whole mess of terrain? All options available. So take to the skies and see what you can see! What awaits you up in the air?

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

Pick the right centerpiece for your player count! Set that in the middle of the table:

Give each player a Starting Tile:

They should take a matching Hot Air Balloon:

Shuffle the other tiles up and place stacks of four face-up so that each edge of the Centerpiece has a stack of four touching it.

Place the Sun / Moon Token, sun-side up, next to the indicated space on the Centerpiece. Choose one of each type of Objective Tile (randomly is fine), as well:

Set the scorepad aside:

Randomly order the Hot-Air Balloons clockwise from the Sun Space on the Centerpiece Tile. You should be ready to start!

Gameplay

Float off in your Hot-Air Balloon and see the sights! Here, you’re just trying to have the nicest time seeing various animals, terrains, and flowers.

Each turn, you can place your Hot-Air Balloon on any unoccupied space (the Sun Token counts as occupied). Once you do, take the top tile and add it to the right or left side of your Panorama. You can stagger it as necessary to make the images match up how you’d like. Then, move the Sun Token clockwise to the next space with a Hot-Air Balloon on it. That player will take their turn next. Note that this means in certain circumstances, you may take multiple consecutive turns! That’s actually most of the game. Love a quick explanation.

Play continues until any one pile is depleted. Once a player depletes a stack, they flip the Sun Token to the moon side and lay their Hot-Air Balloon face-down, making a balloon-deflating noise to indicate their time in the sky is over. It says that pretty explicitly in the rulebook, so if you’re not making the noise, you’re really just robbing yourself of the experience. This means every other player has one final turn as well, and once they take theirs, the game ends!

Scoring can be a bit tricky. Score the Objective Tiles first, friendly, in that if multiple players tie for the most (or least) they all get the full 10 points. Then, each player scores their Terrains. For each Terrain Zone (a contiguous block of horizontally-connected terrain), you score the number of animals multiplied by the number of flowers. Keep in mind that anything times 0 is also 0, so make sure you’re balancing!

Tally up scores and the player with the most points wins!

Player Count Differences

I don’t see a whole lot of differences here, with one big caveat: at higher player counts, you have to manage your turn order wisely. It still matters at two players, as generally if you’re taking three turns for your opponent’s two, you’re probably going to win, but you don’t want to keep looping all the way around the board and setting your opponents all up for extra turns. You’ll sometimes need to in order to get that one perfect tile, but don’t make a habit of it. Now, you’ll notice that the game doesn’t quite scale with player count (you’re really only adding four extra tiles per player), but while that means competition might be a bit tighter for certain tiles, it also means that you’re not going to see the game’s playtime balloon with more people. The game remains cozy no matter the player count, though, so I wouldn’t say I have a huge preference.

Strategy

• Watch out for how far you’re moving. You don’t want to be ballooning off into the night every turn. While that means you can always get exactly the tile you want, you’re giving your opponents a lot of space to take extra turns. You cannot win if they’re getting significantly more turns than you, so try to jump ahead a large amount sparingly.
• You need to get Animals and Flowers. It’s a similar scoring archetype to the classic Kingdomino, meant to prevent you overindexing on just one thing. You can’t just get animals
• Don’t ignore the Objective Tiles. They’re 10 points each! That’s not nothing, for certain, and if you let one player get them all, well, 30 points is a major chunk of scoring before you’re even getting to Terrain. Plan ahead to make sure you’re keeping those tiles in mind.
• Keep an eye on what your opponents are doing; they’ll run away with the game if you let them. Yeah, if you see one player just going for, say, 40+ points in one Terrain, you really should have stopped them before they get there. Especially at lower player counts, it’s more zero-sum. At four, y’all should focus on building up over stopping one individual player. At two, if you’re hurting your opponent it’s basically the same as helping yourself.
• While there are ratios and breakdowns of what symbols are in play, keep in mind that there are often tiles randomly left out. You can’t always rely on a completely fair breakdown of what’s available, and sometimes that just means that you might have picked the wrong horse for the race and your opponent has had a bit more luck with what’s on the tiles in play this game. That might make pivoting worth it?
• Don’t cut off a good Terrain; just focus on building on the other side if you can’t extend that one right now. One good Terrain can be your lynchpin for the game if you play your cards right, so if you’re investing in one spot, keep the good times rolling! Just build off of the other side of your panorama, if you can.
• There’s no pressure; you’re literally allowed to pick up a tile, see how it fits, decide you don’t like it, and put it back. Haste makes waste and all that, but be mindful and respectful of other players’ time. You are totally allowed, in the game’s rules, to take as many tiles as you’d like and see how they fit. If you do that every turn for the entire game, you might win, but you’ll find yourself hard-pressed to get anyone else to play with you ever again.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• Very cozy. This and Dorfromantik are peas in a pod on that front. They both have some good spatial puzzles to them underneath a pleasant theme and a nice art style. I’m always a fan of cozy gaming, granted, but it’s always nice to see how prominent it’s been and stayed over the last few years.
• I like the art style a lot! I particularly like the crows. They look really stupid, and I think that’s wonderful. That takes a very particular kind of skill to make them look goofy and endearing, and Melody Leblond did an excellent job. Also worked on designing the game? Double threat.
• I thematically love hot-air balloons; why aren’t there more hot-air balloon games? They’re so whimsical, and especially for a cozy game, whimsy is part of the joy. I think that and the art are why people like Flamecraft so much.
• The management of the Terrain Areas is delightful and challenging. I do wish that the boundaries between them were a bit clearer in the cases of adjacent corners, but otherwise I think managing the challenge of how to fit them together and when and how to stagger is neat! It gives an extra dimension to how I think about my strategy.
• Pretty easy to pick up and play. You can even play it with young players if you want to ignore scoring and just make it pretty, who cares? Have them tell you a story about what they saw in their hot-air balloon as they traveled to build up story skills. You can really make a game anything if you want; the rules are just a few people’s idea of how to have fun with what’s in the box. But in all seriousness, it’s a rules-light game with some vaguely-challenging scoring, yes, but pretty quick to play.
• I like the turn order mechanism; it’s simple enough to explain. It has a similar structure to Tokaido‘s “last goes first” but the physical rotation of the Sun Token also gives a sense of time passing which is really nice and thematic. It’s ludonarrative alignment! You love to see it. But I like that the physical movement of the Sun Token makes it easy to determine who goes next in a logical way for players.
• I demand that every player make a balloon-deflating noise when the game is over. It’s in the rulebook! Sometimes I’m a stickler for the rules and those times are every time the rulebook asks the player to make a funny noise. It genuinely makes the game better.

Mehs

• I think I’d like the curves of the pieces to be more pronounced. Just a bit more wibble to make the connections more pronounced as well.
• Scoring is kind of a pain, since it’s a little all over the place. It’s one of those things where yes, multiplication isn’t that hard, but making sure you got every Terrain with no way to physically cross one off is a little annoying.

Cons

• I’m pretty good at shuffling tiles, but you’re kind of on your own with this one. These tiles are a bananas-weird shape. I haven’t learned how to riffle shuffle them yet like the Kingdomino tiles, but I will.
• I think in general I’d like the scale to be a bit larger, both from the tiles and from the icons on the tiles. Everything is very tiny! It can sometimes make the animals and the flowers a bit tough to see, and I think the game’s art is really nice and I would like to see it take on a larger scale.

Overall: 8.5 / 10

Oh, yes, Panorama is a good one. It might be a bit lighter than some of you might expect, but I think Scorpion Masqué’s in-house “only good games” policy seems to be continuing in spades. Plus, they made the Zombie Kidz series and other light games; this studio really runs the gamut. Sometimes I forget that they did Dead Cells as well. But yes, Panorama is firmly a casual game, even if the scoring can be a little tricky. The coziness of the game aligns with its complexity, and that’s nice to see. You just get a simplish game of taking tiles and building the nicest panorama as you loosely compete with your opponents. Loosely being the operative term, here; I think you’d be hard-pressed to get really intense with your strategy or gameplay. You’re ballooning! Treat the game with the appropriate amount of whimsy! Otherwise, it’s pretty much all here: great art, compelling and casual gameplay, and solid component quality. I should likely complain a bit about the odd box size, but honestly I enjoyed the game enough that I forgot to care. This is the kind of game you can play while having a nice conversation with a partner or teach your parents so that you can relate across the generational divide because your dad insists you never played board games growing up and you know that’s a lie. How do I know what Pit is, Richard? Was I really into commodities trading when I was eight, Richard? But that’s a conversation for my therapist. In the meantime, I just think Panorama has been a nice and pleasant game to play with my friends! It’s floaty in both theme and gameplay and it, like a good balloon, lands well for me. So if you’re looking for something cozy without too much complexity, you enjoy a touch of thematic whimsy, or you just believe in your bones that Scorpion Masqué does not miss (correctly), you’ll likely have a lot of fun with Panorama! I did.

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