Review: Clip Cut Parks (Renegade)

The city needs more parks, and it’s up to you to build them. So grab your trusty scissors and start cutting your way to recreational success in Clip Cut Parks, a new title from Renegade Game Systems.

Wait just a minute… scissors and cutting? Yes, scissors and cutting. And colorful sheets of paper. And cards and dice (but you don’t cut either of those).

Clip Cut Parks breaks new gaming ground by turning the popular “roll and write” genre into “roll and cut.” It kicks the genre’s planning and strategy up a few notches, and delivers a fascinating and challenging experience for families and friends.

Here are the top five things you need to know about Clip Cut Parks so that you can get clipping.

Unique Park Pages

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The game seats two to four players, each with their own colorful scissors and a page of squares to cut out and place in their parks. The pad of park pages contains four designs organized into a repeating order so that no sheets get duplicated in a game.

Each sheet contains 63 squares that show colored park features like tents, water, trees and play areas, plus icons for recycling and wildlife features. Both the colors and icons become important when completing park cards (more about those soon).

Rolling the Cutting Die

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Every round starts with the first player rolling a custom die with faces showing things like four 1s, two 2s, a single 4, and so on. Each number on the face represents one cut of that many squares, so the face with two 2s means “make two cuts that are each two squares long.”

You can only make the exact combination of cuts shown on the die; no more, no less. You can’t combine shorter cuts into a single longer cut on the same round, although you can add to a cut that you made earlier in the game.

Scissor Skills

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Wielding your scissors and cutting the park page is the most challenging thing in the game.

As you cut the page, pieces will fall free. You’ll use these to complete your park cards. Once a piece falls out, it’s done; that’s its final shape. You can’t cut it any more, even if you have cuts left from the die roll.

That’s why you need to pay close attention to your cuts, especially later in the game when your page has lots of slices. It’s easy to get focused on trimming out a particular combination only to discover that some other pieces are unexpectedly fluttering to the table.

Piecing Your Parks

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The goal of the game is to complete your five park cards before your opponents complete theirs.

To do that, you place the pieces that you cut from your park page onto the appropriate spots or sections on the cards, matching them by color and icon. Sometimes you also match by shape, because some cards need several squares connected in a certain pattern.

If you can’t immediately play a piece that fell out of your sheet, then you crumple it and put it nearby in case you need a tie-breaker at the end of the game. If you and an opponent finish your last park card on the same turn, then the winner is the player with the fewest crumpled pieces.

Completing a park card often gives you a bonus, such as an extra cut or a token that lets you ignore one color or icon requirement during a play. Use your bonuses wisely, because they can often make or break a game.

Go Co-op for Younger Players

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One caveat for parents with younger kids: Clip Cut Parks has a lot of interconnected things happening every turn, so even though the box says it’s for ages eight and up, playing this with kids under 12 takes care and extra attention.

Partner with your child for the first few games and treat this like a cooperative title instead of a competitive one. Start by playing together through a handful of cards so they can practice the strategy of rolling, examining, cutting, and placing. Be extra patient, because picking up this game may take some time.

Verdict

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Renegade gets a lot of credit for creating an entirely new kind of game experience. Somehow they transmuted dice, cards, paper, and scissors into a spatial problem solving game that plays like nothing we ever saw before.

We taught the game to people from grandparents to teens, and every round was a blast. Thanks to the random combinations of die rolls, cards, pages, and player creativity, every game offers a very different challenge. And if you want to really test your skills, add the Grand Parks cards to your deck and watch the difficulty go up.

Younger kids can definitely learn the game, provided parents introduce it with plenty of patience. Even though your child probably loves and skillfully plays other strategy games, the combination of elements in Clip Cut Parks demands a different level of thinking. Older kids will be fine, but go slow and easy with the under-12 set.