Decrypto designer’s plane game Wayfinders looks breezy and beautiful

The next game from Decrypto designer Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance is touching down later this year – and it looks to be a much lighter affair than his brilliant brain-bending word game.

Wayfinders is all about planes. Players assign their workers to hangers to collect resources, before spending the goods to fly between the islands that make up the game’s main play area.

The grid of island tiles is randomly generated each game, consisting of islands offering extra resources, points and bonus effects. When a player passes through an island, they can build an airstrip there – making it cheaper to pass through on future turns, and giving them extra ways of scoring.

There’s a light bit of player interaction, in that players have to pay anyone who already has an airstrip on an island before building their own, but there’s no way of directly blocking someone else. In a similar vein, multiple players can place their workers on the same hangers, although it’s the first to collect their workers that gets to take one resource per worker they have assigned.

Islands can score in a number of different ways, from collecting certain sets of colours to building airstrips on particular arrangements of islands, or enabling other scoring conditions, such as leftover resources or sharing islands with your opponents.

Wayfinders’ presentation is as clear and colourful as its rules, with illustrator Gica Tam and Dinosaur Island publisher Pandasaurus giving Dagenais-Lespérance’s gameplay a bright, poppy look.

The whole game plays in as little as 20 to 45 minutes with two to four people. It’s due for release on October 30th, and will cost $40 (£33) in the US.