Game Review - Everyone Loves a Parade

I like a wide variety of vegetables, but I do not like parsnips. Our feature game this month, Everyone Loves a Parade, was indeed a parsnip on my plate. This review will be different from any of my reviews to date as this will not exactly be a positive review of this game. Please keep in mind while reading this that these reviews are my own personal opinions. You may love parsnips and in turn love this game!

In Everyone Loves a Parade, players are rival decorators with the goal of decorating their parade float as beautifully as possible with flowers, flags and balloons while simultaneously depriving their opponents of high-scoring décor and placement among the crowd. The game is played in three rounds, during each of which players take three turns in clockwise order. During each round, pieces of the street (“crowd” cards) are revealed equal to the number of players and dice depicting decoration types and colours are placed on the card. At the end of each round, players will choose a piece of street to place their float on, attempting to match colours and decorations on the dice as closely as possible to the ones they have chosen for their float. During their turn in a round, each player chooses a decoration to add to their float from the 5 face up cards in the “warehouse”; much like one would choose coloured train cards in Ticket to Ride. Each decoration card not only depicts a type and colour of decoration but also an action the player may carry out immediately after choosing the card. Actions include re-rolling an already placed die, looking at the top two cards of the deck to add one to your float, re-rolling a die depicting balloons, swapping a card from your float with one in the warehouse, moving one die up to 2 crowd cards over, changing one die to any side you desire, or rolling a new die (either decoration or colour) and adding it to a crowd card.

For example, in the above picture I can choose any of the shown cards. Red and Flowers are the most uncommon on the dice while balloons and blue are the most common. This means red flowers will be worth the most amount of points while blue balloons are worth the least. I'm going to go all in and try for red flowers. I take the card and follow through with the action symbol depicted in the small circle at the bottom of the card. This red flowers allows me to re-roll any die showing the balloons face. Once I have re-rolled the balloons die and placed the red flowers beside my float, the turn passes to the person on my left. The round continues this way until each player has chosen 3 cards from the warehouse and added them to their float.

When the round ends, players take turns placing their floats on crowd cards. The order in which this happens is decided by “Order Cards” handed out at the beginning of the round. Players are allowed to know which order card they have, but not which one their opponents have. The order cards are numbered from 1 to 8 so if I am given a 6, I know I am likely going to be placing my float later than at least one or two of my opponents. Each order card also includes an additional bonus action players can complete before placing their float. The bonuses grow in power level with the number of card. Order card #1 has no ability because I would already have the huge advantage of going first, whereas order card #8 has a super powerful bonus of getting to draw a card to immediately add to my float in addition to rolling a new die and adding it to a crowd card.

For example, since my float has red flowers, red flags, and blue flags I would ideally like to find a crowd card with dice depicting blue, red, flowers and flags. Matching one of the features (say, flags) scores as much as what is shown in the golden circle in the left corner of the decoration card. Matching both of the features (say, blue flags) will score double what is shown in the golden circle. Finding a crowd card that has every attribute a player needs is extremely rare so plan A, plan B, plan C and so on must be implemented. Out of the crowd cards shown, the third one (the Games Store) is my best option as it would score me 25 points, followed by the Garden store which would give me 19, then the Mansky Safe Co. which gets me 14 points and my last choice would be the Terrace that would get me a mere 9 points.

If I have a low numbered order card then I will likely get my first or second choice of crowd card. If I have a high numbered order card, I will likely get my third or even fourth choice of crowd card. But don't despair! The bonuses on the card may help the crowd card to score me more points.

Scoring is totaled after each round and the game ends after the scoring of the third round. The winner is the player with the most points – plain and simple!

Now, let's talk about why I didn't like this game. The biggest aspect of this game that turned me off was the randomness of so many parts. The cards that are revealed in the warehouse are random, the re-rolling of dice is random and even the order in which you place your float at the end of the round was random. I'm not a hyper competitive person, but I do absolutely like to try my best to win. I found this game gave you so little control over what was happening, it was nearly impossible to actually try to win, and even if you did, another player that seemed to have a horseshoe hidden somewhere would win without barely trying. I understand chance is a part of almost every board game in existence but this game simply had too much of it.

Another part that was extremely frustrating was how often the other players (intentionally or not) would completely mess up your plan and you were left helpless to do anything about it. The only thing you could do was try to re-plan and achieve that goal, but with only three turns in each round, you are simply not given enough time to adjust your goal successfully. I remember feeling this exact same way playing Lords of Waterdeep when an opponent would place their meeple in the area of town I was planning to go and then I was left to re-plan. I love board games, I love D&D, but I do not like Lords of Waterdeep for this reason. Everyone Loves a Parade seemed to almost constantly instill that feeling of “Don't roll that die. Oh, please don't take that decoration. Place your float anywhere but ther.....OH COME ON!” It was as if heavily sighing every time an opponent took any action was part of the game, and I don't appreciate that.

Because of this randomness and “knife fight in a phone booth” feeling, I honestly found myself riddled with anxiety the entire time. I so wanted to have a pretty float that would score me lots of points, but just ended up being afraid to commit to anything in case that plan got ruined over and over again. I have felt this anxiety before when playing very intense board games like Pandemic or Elder Sign, but in those games at least I wasn't miffed at my friends for constantly ruining my plans. I know at least one other player that also felt that constant anxiety during this frantic parade and did not enjoy it. In fact, out of the 10 of us that played the game that night, the best response it got was “It was interesting...maybe good for really casual players”

It was honestly a little surprising this game went over so poorly with so many of us as the game seems to promise so much. The box depicts a bright marching band, a huge blow up dog (honestly, I am sold on anything that involves a dog) and confetti flying through the air but it was really just...boring. For some reason, maybe the art style or the story of being decorators for a parade, we all found it rather stale. One player suggested if the skin of the game were changed to archaeology or even the classic resource gathering theme but the mechanics stayed the same, it would be more interesting. Even more surprising is the fact that the game is made by Calliope Games – the makers of Tsuro which is a fantastic and very popular game. It seems maybe this game was just a bit of a misstep.

Again, this is my own personal opinion of this parsnip of a game but maybe parsnips are your thing. Come on down and play the open copy in our Games Library and see if you love this parade!