| 👨👩👧👦 | Players: 2-6 |
| ⏳ | Time: 1 hour |
| 🎂 | Ages: 8+ |
| ⚙️ | Mechanisms: Co-op, Memory, Real-Time |
Welcome to A5 Logistics, <employee name>! We look forward to extracting value from your skills and improving shareholder value this quarter! Will you be invaluable to the company, or expendable? Let’s jump into your first week in the warehouse, and find out!
Wilmot’s Warehouse (from designers Ricky Haggett, Richard Hogg and David King II) is a cooperative memory game in which players work together to store items in a warehouse and then recall their locations at the end of the game. Each day of play there is some rule that governs the item tiles, for example, only half of the players can look at it. The foreman for the turn needs to decide where to store their item (facedown) in the warehouse. It is up to the players to create some method for recalling where each item was stored, and after 5 days of storing items, there is a flurry of activity as customers make orders and players need to remember where each item was stored correctly.
Wilmot’s Warehouse has a very welcoming modern abstract art style. It meshes really well with the friendly faceless corporation vibe the game is themed with, and there is a lot of fantastic little details that poke fun at the corporate world. The (fancy black-core) tiles come pre-punched and are kept in a sturdy canvas bag. Apart from the shrink-wrap, the game doesn’t include any plastic – the cards come in a little box which can be re-used for storage.
The rulebook is well written and laid out in an interesting way I’ve never seen before. The first half of the book ‘tells the story’ of the game, introducing the theme and running you ‘the employee’ through your job. It offers video rules, but the second half of the rulebook details the game’s rules in a clear and un-ambiguous manner.
I’ve played Wilmot’s Warehouse just once – usually I play games more times (at least 3) before writing up a review but the nature of this game makes me happy to write my review after one play.
I will begin by saying, I had a lot of fun playing this game – we spent a lot of time coming up with fun stories to help remember the locations of the different tiles by linking items in each row together. Despite the event cards that shake up each round, we had no trouble recalling the positions of items as we spent (probably too long) reiterating our mnemonics. During the endgame, we were able to recall the positions of all our items in less than a minute and a half of the five given, and we made no mistakes. This of course – was fun and rewarding, but it raised questions regarding future plays of the game. How can we make it harder? We would have to add some more restrictions somehow, and the rulebook only offers minor options for stepping up difficulty. And this leads me to the big question:
Is this even a game? Or is it an activity? It’s a tricky thing to answer, and while I enjoyed the experience the game offered I would probably lean towards describing it more as an activity. That said, I would give it another go or two, and I would look forward to the experience being different with different groups of people. Possibly somewhat ironically, I feel like this game would be a perfect team-building activity for work colleagues…
Overall I think this game is worth a try but maybe not worth investing in unless you think your friends would enjoy this sort of thing for a few plays. I do adore the theming and production, it’s clear a lot of effort went into polishing this game. And I very much enjoyed having Matt from SUSD rate our performance when the game was over! If you would like to learn more about the game, check it out on the CMYK store!
The copy of Wilmot’s Warehouse used for this review was provided to The Boardgame Detective by CMYK Games
The Boardgame Detective 