Decades ago, your family acquired lots of land. Now, it’s all yours to build a theme park with! You’ll need to manage your money, buy more land, hire employees, and build the best attractions to make sure your park succeeds. But be careful! Other park owners are out to sabotage you! Maybe you’ll just need to do some sabotaging of your own… Alright, are you ready for fun? Let’s go!

What Is It?

A Graphic Novel Adventure / Role-Playing Type Game – The game makes a “choose-your-own-adventure” model into a graphic novel style, and incorporates elements of an RPG by having the player(s) track “stats” such as money, visitors, thrill level, and more. The game has the player(s) mark days off their calendar as time passes as well, and once one year (365 days) is up, the adventure ends and the player(s) can calculate their final score(s).

Who Is It For?

  • 1 Or More Player – In other graphic novel adventures, I’ve always felt it was clearly meant for 1 player. This adds competitive elements to the game (espionage, sabotage, doing business, et cetera), so it can be played multi-player, but only if every player has their own copy of the book
  • Ages 12 & Up – Not terribly difficult to play, but there is a lot of stuff to keep track of, which might be harder for younger players
  • Fans of the them park theme / some whimsical silliness
  • Fans of small puzzles (i.e. logic puzzles types)
  • Players who don’t mind keeping track of a lot of game info

PROS

  • Aesthetics – Really cute art; fun, and colorful
  • Theme – Really fun, and the story introduces a few different theme parks which are all unique and fun
  • There were a bunch of puzzles of various styles, which I really enjoyed
  • Quality of the book/binding is good
  • You can use the tracking sheets in the book, or print them out easily from the website
  • Interesting choices
    • Lots of options, and you can try different things through different plays

CONS

  • Rules – I thought the initial rules could use a bit more. After reading through them, I still felt confused about what to do, and wasn’t sure I was recording actions right at first. Then, when you go to certain passages, it tells you to flip to another passage for more details/rules, and I just didn’t understand why those rules weren’t available for easy reference with the rest of the rules
  • There was a lot of bookkeeping for your park stats, money, park layout, and so on. It made sense with the theme, but it just got old quickly for me, and took me out of the fun of the experience
  • The multi-player rules seemed weird to me because the graphic novel adventures have always seemed like a solo experience to me

Final Thoughts

I love the theme and the artwork of this book, and overall, I liked the story within the book. I also really enjoyed the puzzles I found throughout, and was always excited when I was presented with a new puzzle.

That said, the experience itself fell a bit flat for me. I thought the majority of the rules were unclear, and there was way too much bookkeeping for my liking, which became boring after a while.

After my initial play, I just went in again to read through more panels without keeping track of money and stats, or worrying about scoring at all. It allowed me to enjoy the world of the novel much more, and focus on the puzzles and the story.

I like the intention of the book, but personally, I wish it had less upkeep so that the focus could be on the story instead of meticulously buying land, building attractions, and so on.

Overall, this one just wasn’t as much for me, so I thought it was just okay. But if you like having all those stats and numbers to keep track of, which I know plenty of people do, and you like the theme park theme, then you’ll probably love it!

Additional Information:
My Final Rating – 5/10

Designer – Shuky
Artist – Gorobei
Publisher – Van Ryder Games
MSRP – $22.99
Website