On the coast of the North Sea, the harsh landscape brings threats of constant flooding but the chance for a rich reward. You must choose how to spend your time and resources. Will you spend your time enhancing your farmyard or will you build up the dike to protect the whole town?

In Lowlands, players will each have control of a farmyard board. Buildings and features can be purchased to customize your farmyard, maximizing profits. But be careful. Focusing too much on your own land could lead to ruin if the dike breaks. Pre-order your copy of Lowlands today from our website or your local retailer and prepare for the oncoming storm.

Improve Your Land

The rolling hills stretch before you. It may not look like much, but the land is yours. With time and hard work, the land can turn from a bunch of scraggly bushes to a vibrant green pasture. You’ll need lots of helping hands to get the work done. Thankfully, you will have three farmers to assign to tasks.

When it’s time to get to work, place a farmer on an action space on your farmyard board and use the farmer’s value to resolve the actions. To get the most out of your farmer, you will have to think strategically about which actions to take and the best time to take them.

Looking carefully at the face up improvement tiles, the Lake Cabin looks like a good option. Using your farmer token with the value of 4, you can take an action to add that tile to your farm board. The Lake Cabin is a feature and can only be placed on a farmyard space with specific terrain, in this case a lake. At the end of the game when the storm surges, you’ll score 3 victory points for each orthogonally adjacent space that is empty.

Expand Your Farm

The upkeep and enhancement of the land and livestock is important but don’t miss out on the opportunity to expand your farm with buildings. Building tiles can help you customize your farm, giving you new abilities or advantages. The brown edges of the building tiles can be used to enclose pastures, which will let you house sheep and keep them safely in your farmyard. After all that hard work constructing fences and bringing in sheep, you don’t want the sheep to escape!

With the previously constructed fences, this pasture is almost complete. The Dairy tile would enclose the pasture without needing to buy additional fences. The Dairy tile gives one bonus coin for every two sheep. Since this pasture has two sheep, immediately gain the bonus coin when you build the Dairy. Coins can be used to buy sheep and place additional farmers.

Continue to place the rest of your farmers, tend to your sheep and expand your farm as you choose. But keep an eye on the dike! The waters will rise and rush in to overwhelm your farm if you aren’t building up protection.

Will you focus on tending to your flock or will you prepare for the ominous storm on the horizon? Make your choice in Lowlands, available for pre-order now!