Wondrous Creatures

This is a game I feel I shouldn't like, but I end up quite enjoying it. It's almost a heavy game, with lots of stuff to do. An island with many never-seen-before creatures has been discovered. Many scientists flock to it to discover new species and to collect them. During the game you will collect resources, discover creatures, and spend those resources to collect the creatures. You gain points in various ways, and highest scorer wins. All of this sounds like just another Eurogame to me, and that's why I did not expect to like this much. 

You have three crew pieces, and each piece takes up two hexes. One of the things you can do is to place a crew on the board. When you do this, you collect resources from adjacent hexes, or you collect creature cards. You may also collect eggs. Eggs are a kind of resource too. After you have placed all your crew, you will need to perform a reset action to take them back. While they are out there, they block others from placing their crew on the same spaces. 

Some of the habitat hexes (those single hexes showing fruit, coral, flower or mushroom) have special abilities you can use, by spending a net. For example getting an extra resource, sweeping the card market and getting a card. 

There is a market of 6 creatures. There is always a cost to play a creature into your reserve, i.e. your collection of creatures. This is how you will spend resources. Creature cards come in 5 types, and they have powers which trigger in different ways. There are single use powers, permanent powers, powers that trigger when you do a reset, end-game scoring powers, and finally limited use powers. In the middle of the screen above, you can see public objectives. When you fulfil an objective, you can spend an action to claim a trophy. You will gain points and other rewards. Some of these objectives have two tiers, e.g. get 3 butterflies or get 6 butterflies. If you fulfil the first one, you can't do the second. It will be left for the other players. When you reach 3 butterflies, you have to think hard whether to take a trophy now or to collect three more butterflies to claim the bigger reward.

This is your player board. One of your crew pieces is your captain, and it has a special ability, but this is unlocked only after you fulfil your first public objective. 

So this is essentially yet another game about collecting resources and fulfilling contracts, here presented as playing a creature into your reserve. Creatures are worth points and they also give powers. There are many public objectives you compete on. So far so typical. I'm not entirely sure why I enjoy the game. I think it is because it gives me goals and a sense of progress. In the first game I played, I decided that the first thing I would do was to unlock my captain's ability. That meant I needed to find a public objective that I could complete quickly. There was one which required a certain number of creatures of a certain species. That was manageable, and I focused on doing that in the early game. After I had that, I found I had another goal which was not too far from completion. I then worked towards that. Since all the creatures have powers, you want to fully utilise them. I had a creature which scored points based on how many creatures I had which lived on flower terrain. Before I played it, I wanted to make sure I had four other creatures in play with the flower terrain icon. That would maximise the points I received. This became my next small project. 

This is also a tableau building game, like Race for the Galaxy, one of my favourite games. Your collection of creatures is your tableau and they give you various powers. If you have a creature which scores points every time you gain an egg, you will try to collect eggs at every opportunity. Putting together a set of creatures that work well together is satisfying. 

When you fulfil a public objective, you place one of your quills on the objective card. 

Quills are taken from your player board. They are along the left edge of your player board. Whenever you remove a quill, you gain the benefit listed next to it. 

I am guessing Wondrous Creatures makes me happy because it keeps feeding me a sense of purpose and progress. I still feel I shouldn't like it, but strangely I have to admit I do like it. The lesson here is sometimes you are wrong about what you think you will like or dislike. I'm happy to be proven wrong sometimes.