Cue Up a Little Night Music and Play the Board Game Nocturne

Nocturne is a new set collection game that incorporates a mostly new bidding mechanic for players to acquire tiles to spice up the usual point-salady aspect to games of this ilk. It’s the latest title from Flatout Games, the boutique publisher behind the board games Cascadia, Calico, and Point Salad/City, and also this year’s Cascadia Rolling Rivers/Hills games. 

In Nocturne, players will bid to claim tiles from a common tableau, collecting them but not placing or building anything else with the tiles they get. The tableau size varies by player count, but the method of obtaining them is always the same. The start player on each turn, who will usually just be the winner of the last tile, places their lowest bidding token (2-7 to start, plus a star token that is automatically the winner), after which the next player may place a higher token on any orthogonally adjacent tile without a token on it already or pass. The bidding continues to snake around the tableau until all players pass or someone has placed a bid that can’t be topped. The highest bidder gets that tile and leaves their bidding token in the vacated space. All players may then take one losing token and place it on the sprite board to claim tiles at the end of the phase, or may just take them all back.

Tiles score in all kinds of ways—sea tiles are just worth a fixed number of points each, feather tiles are worth more the more you have, egg tiles are worth more if you have the most of any player, herb and mushroom tiles score in sets, and so on. There are mirror tiles that you can use as an exact copy of another tile you have, treasure chests that are worth -1 point but that let you draw three tiles from the stack and keep one, and concoction tiles that let you draw three concoction cards (private objectives) to keep one.

The bidding mechanic creates some new opportunities for strategy because of the rule that each bidder must place a token on an adjacent tile. After a couple of tiles are gone from the tableau, it will be possible to “corner cast,” in the game’s lingo, which means to set it up so that you can start the bidding on a tile that has no legal plays next to it, because there are no adjacent tiles left. That’s pretty significant given the bidding tokens you have, since you can then just drop your lowest one on that tile and claim it, when you might usually have to use higher tokens for that. 

The phase continues until all tiles are claimed, after which players who placed tokens on the Sprites board can then claim tiles from there in descending bid value. These are the same types of tiles as those in the tableau but are set aside at the start of the round, two per player, to be claimed afterwards. The first phase, twilight, has three public objective cards that go to whoever completes them first; the second phase, midnight, has three different cards that any player can score. When the game ends after players have finished taking tiles from the Sprites board in the midnight phase, each player adds up all of their points from tiles, from public objectives, and from private objectives (concoction cards). 

I skipped over the theme of Nocturne because it’s not really that interesting or connected to how it plays; it’s yet another game of forest creatures and spells and herbs and mushrooms and flowers, kind of like Brew from a few years ago and, frankly, way too many board games out there. There are also unique player powers … that you can use only once per game, not even once per phase, so I’m not even sure why the designer bothered with them. Between those factors and the fiddly final scoring, Nocturne is more of a very good game than a great one, powered by one sort of novel mechanic—my friend Mike Gnade, owner of Rock Manor Games, pointed out that it’s slightly similar to the bidding in Furnace—and what seems like pretty good balance across the scoring methods. It’s a very solid game, playable in under an hour with a pretty short teach, but Cascadia remains Flatout’s undisputed gem.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.