I wrote previously on the site that I wasn’t particularly impressed with the game Umbrella and that the components were the only reason I tried this game. You can read my component review article now, but how does the game itself actually play? Was it more puzzle than game as I expected? Let’s take a look.

Umbrella is an easy to learn and easy to play game that works very well as a board game night pastime. It’s great before the big game of the evening, or as a fun social experience after the game. In Umbrella, players move umbrella pieces from various boards directly adjacent to them to their own board, pushing other pieces aside and trying to complete colored patterns. Players start the game with a few small puzzles to solve that involve getting all of the same colored pieces in certain places on the board. For example, you might need to get all of the same colored umbrellas in the four corners of your board.

The puzzle is that when you push a new piece into your board – whether from the left or right, up or down – you push another piece out the other side. So your board is constantly changing and you have to decide which pieces to put where. Think of a maze, only much more complicated.

The trick here is that you only have access to tiles from a few places. To your left and right, from the center of the table, or from your own supply at the bottom of your board. This means that you are competing with everyone else for the center tile boards, and with the players next to you for the left and right boards. The only board where you are guaranteed to have the shields is your own board, but each shield on your board at the end of the game is worth 1 minus point, so you have to balance that out too.

As you complete patterns, you can mark that color on your score bar, potentially unlocking more points. However, it won’t help you to make patterns of the same color too often, as there are only a limited number of colored dots you can place a marker on. While it feels like a bigger puzzle to solve, it wasn’t too puzzling for me.

I think there are a lot of people who won’t enjoy this. This isn’t really a traditional board game as you might imagine. There’s no worker placement, no drafting, no cards, no deck or bag building, etc. It’s just a puzzle, but a puzzle that can get messed up if other players grab the pieces you need.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Umbrella. Since we are always looking for more filler games for our board game nights, I think Umbrella is a game that will be on our shelves for a while. And that’s high praise, since we keep far less than we discard from the collection!