Sand Art review

Sand Art from 25th Century Games grabbed my attention with a heavy dose of nostalgia. I fondly remember pouring colored sand into various shaped bottles in elementary school. I held onto those bottles for quite some time. Even after the sand had long ago homogenized into a rainbow mess, there was just something about the little bottles that appealed to me.

Well, it turns out simulating that experience on paper as an adult does not have the same attraction. Sand Art, the board game, is a “roll and write” game, but instead of rolling, you select your action from a shared row of cards. You spend the game picking an action, and then either gaining sand into your reserve or coloring in a section of your bottle. Public and private objectives based on the colors and patterns you draw score points at the end of the game to determine the winner.

At the start of the game, there's an interesting puzzle: you have to move back and forth on the action row, and you can't change direction whenever you want or land on the same space as someone else. However, the game quickly tosses that out the window once your bottle starts to fill up with two-dimensional sand, and you unlock the ability to take whatever action you want. Once that happens, there really isn’t a game left. Without any restriction on what you can do, everyone is free to maximize the best scoring cards without any real challenge. Winning the game comes down to whether you lucked out picking up a good private objective card at the right time without sacrificing an action needed to maximize the public cards. To make it worse, there will likely be one public card that is worth the most points, so everyone will literally just be doing the same exact thing. 

The game ends up being spent alternating between three actions. Get sand. Mix sand into one of the higher-scoring secondary colors. Deposit sand in the bottle. Rinse and repeat. By removing movement and selection restrictions, you no longer need to think about your turn. Follow that pattern of actions over and over again, and you will fill your bottle, and someone will win by a point or two.

Fundamentally, a game needs to provide a challenge, an interesting decision, or just be outrageously fun to play if lacking the former two elements. Sand Art’s win condition is too straightforward and obvious to be challenging, and it removes the one interesting decision it had halfway through the game. It turns out coloring in triangles isn’t all that fun. 

If that still sounds appealing to you, the game comes with a generous number of player sheets that will likely outlast anyone's interest in playing the game. It also comes with a set of colored pencils for each player. The lead, or whatever they make colored pencils out of these days, was internally shattered in almost every single pencil in my box, so we had to sharpen them quite a bit before we got them to a usable state. The card quality is decent, and the rules are straightforward.

It turns out not everything needs to be made into a board game. The ideas behind Sand Art sound fun, but it just does not deliver on that potential. The game takes away the few things that could have made it interesting, and even if you choose to just ignore those rules, the underlying puzzle it offers is not engaging enough to be worth your time. It’s never fun to bash someone else’s hard work, but my honest takeaway from playing Sand Art is that the design was too focused on coming up with a way to color in a bottle rather than first developing interesting mechanics. Then again, I’ve never made a game; I just play them.