The Wolves

This is one very eye catching box cover! Ba-dum-tss! The game title is as literal as can be. You play a pack of wolves, and you compete with other wolf packs to be the dominant one on the map. You get to experience the life of a wolf, and all this is done using several clever mechanisms. 

The map is divided into regions, and there are five terrain types. Those six peripheral regions have tokens with quarter, half and full moons. These are the countdown mechanism in the game and one of the ways you score points. Certain actions like recruiting lone wolves to your pack, recruiting wolves from other players to your pack and stealing other players' dens advance the countdown. At certain points in the game these regions will score points based on who has the strongest presence. This aspect of the competition is related to the tempo of the game. 

The game has an interesting core mechanism, and it is related to the six double sided terrain cards every player has a set of. One of them has the same terrain on both sides, and that's the terrain your wolf pack is strongest in. In this example above I am the tundra wolf pack and I am strongest on snow fields. You get to perform two actions on your turn, and performing actions require that you flip between 1 to 3 terrain cards of the same type. All your actions are related to terrain. When you move your wolves, the terrain card you flip determines what kind of terrain they will move to. When you build a den, the terrain cards you flip determine where that den can be placed. It must also be next to one of your alpha wolves. If you don't have a certain terrain face-up, you can't do anything on such terrain. You need flip another card so that you get this terrain face-up. Or if the action you want to perform requires flipping two cards, and you only have one required terrain face-up, you are also stuck. This is the challenge the game poses. You have to plan cleverly what to do and what terrains to do them on, so that you eventually get to perform all the actions you want. You know what's on the other side of each of the terrain cards. 

Your player board is important. A big part of the game is engine building. Yes, I know it sounds weird to talk about wolf packs and engines at the same time. You start the game with many game pieces on your player board. As you perform certain actions, these pieces will be moved to the main map. This unlocks abilities and gives you bonuses. This also gives you points. When you build dens, you can increase the movement range of your wolves, you can increase the number of wolves you get to move per action, and you can increase the influence range of your alpha wolves (called their howl range). 

Wolves hunt in packs. There are five types of prey on the board, and you can score many points by hunting them. To hunt down a prey, you need to have your wolves on three different spaces surrounding the prey. 

This calendar is your countdown timer. Those wolf head coins represent lone wolves when on the map. If your alpha wolves howl near them, you get to recruit them to your pack. You get to place a new wolf on the map, and that coin is moved to this calendar. The moon icons indicate the times when specific regions will be scored. Other than lone wolves, the countdown can also be advanced by poaching wolves from other players and stealing their dens.  

There can be a mean streak in the game, because of how you can steal wolves and dens from other players. This is not easy to do though, and there are ways you can defend against it. To steal a wolf or a den from another player, the action is called Dominate. To do it, you need three terrain cards of the same type. This is only possible with your dominant terrain type. If your opponents want to avoid getting Dominated by you, they just avoid placing dens or regular wolves on your dominant terrain. Only regular wolves can be converted, not alphas. Another way to stay safe is to have two pieces on the same space. You are not 100% safe relying on terrain only. One type of bonus in the game is the terrain token. When you have such a token, you can spend it and treat it as any terrain card. This way, you can steal an opponent piece with 2 terrain cards which are not your dominant terrain, and 1 terrain token. You can even do it with 1 terrain card and 2 terrain tokens. Terrain tokens are hard to come by though, so you probably don't want to spend them like this. 

Right from the get go, you have many options. There are several different ways to grow your pack and score points. You can't do everything, and you will choose to focus on some. In one game I lost out in competing for area majority in the regions, but still did pretty well because I advanced in other areas. I like that when you advance in the various areas, they are not just a mechanism for scoring points. They do affect how effective your pack is. You do want to be able to mobilise more wolves, and to have them move further. This makes the game feel real and thematic. 

I was the blue wolf pack and many of my wolves and dens were stolen by others. Animals! 

I enjoyed The Wolves. It's a mid weight strategy game. It's thematic. It has a clever mechanism. You feel there are many things you want to do, and you are forced to prioritise. You have to plan smart and get your terrain cards on the right side. Scheduling your terrain flipping well to be able to achieve several goals through a few consecutive turns is rewarding. The engine building part of the game is satisfying. You grow your wolf family, and you stand proud at its head. 

I have maxed out my prey type and wolf speed. 

Meadow

Meadow is a game about wildlife in the countryside. The key underlying concept is the food chain. You need certain terrain to be able to support certain plants, you need certain plants to be able to support certain insects, and in turn these insects are food to small animals, and then these small animals are prey of larger animals. You collect and play cards with various icons. The icons allow you to play more cards, and as you "upgrade", you get to play cards with victory points. That is how you eventually win. 

Cards are made available in this 4x4 grid. Every round, you have five tiles which you can use for claiming and playing cards. You place a tile along the edge of this board, pointing at a specific row. Depending on the number on your tile, you take a specific card in that row. 

You can have at most 10 columns of cards in your play area. A column always start with a terrain card. Terrain cards have no prerequisites. All other cards do. Normally cards specify the icons you need to have in order to play them. When you play a non-terrain card, it must partially cover another card. You may cover icons on other cards, causing you to lose these icons. The game requires carefully planning to get to specific icons. You also need to plan carefully when to use which icons. 

You start with a hand of cards. You already have to plan carefully from the get go. The numbers on the leaves are the victory point values. They go from 1 to 5. 

Each player tile has two parts. The pointy part is used when you claim a card from the grid display. The flat part can be used for something else. Let's go from left to right. The two circles are road icons. If you use this, you get to claim two road tiles. Road tiles allow you to play cards which have a landscape layout. The second tile lets you claim any one card from the grid. This is different from using the pointy part. When you use the pointy part, you get to play a card too. If you use the flat part, you don't get to play a card. 

The third tile is a joker. You can treat it as any flat part icon. The fourth tile lets you draw three cards from any deck then keep one. 

This is the other game board. This keeps track of the round number. You play 6 rounds. All those icons around the fireplace is a source of competition. When you have a pair of adjacent icons in your play area, you get to claim the seat between these two icons, placing your point marker. You have three point markers valued 2, 3 and 4. You must place them in this order. 

Any any time there are three decks used for refilling the board. The East cards are mostly terrain cards. The West cards are usually cards related to roads, houses and fences, i.e. human civilisation. The South cards are mostly animals. At mid game, the South cards are replaced by the North cards. These are higher valued animals. 

I think of Meadow is a pyramid building game. You collect and play cards with the right icons to help you play higher value cards. You need to have a strong foundation to be able to build many high value cards. You must plan carefully how icons will be covered by other cards. Timing is very important. You don't want to accidentally cover an icon which you still need. Player interaction can be unforgiving. You will compete for those cards with rare icons. If you watch you opponents closely, you can tell what they need and you can deny them those cards. Even without intentionally frustrating your friends, you sometimes do so accidentally because you have placed your tile in a slot they plan to use. 

The game is almost overproduced. It has pretty card trays and a wooden round marker which to me are not really necessary. They do provide a nice play experience. They are a luxury. 

Gameplay is a pleasant experience. It is satisfying to collect the right combinations of icons and to play those high valued cards. Collecting the right cards can be challenging. You can't pick any card you want. You need to think about how best to use your tiles. This is not really a game for casual players. The game mechanisms are slightly complicated, and even I find myself in long pauses thinking about what I should do next. The game is certainly challenging enough for seasoned gamers. There is some luck, in terms of what kind of cards become available. It is satisfying to work out what you can do given the situation you are in. You certainly make meaningful choices. You can choose to play this in a more peaceful way, without deliberately trying to mess with your opponents. You will be kept busy enough managing your own play area. 

Forest Shuffle

The Game

Forest Shuffle (2023), is one of the currently hot games. I played the digital implementation on BoardGameArena.com. It is a set collection game. You collect cards to form your own forest. Every card is an animal or plant, and they have various scoring criteria. The entire game is about collecting cards which score points based on what other cards you have. You maximise collecting the right combinations of cards so that you score points efficiently. 

There is a shared forest in the game. Cards here can be taken by any player. It is a common pool. On your turn, you either take 2 cards or play 1 card. When taking cards, you can take from the shared forest or from the draw deck. When you play a card, you play from your hand to your own personal forest. Usually you need to pay a fee to play a card. The fee is other cards in your hand. You place them in the shared forest. That means others might take those cards. If the cards are still there the next time your turn comes, you can take them back. 

When playing cards to your forest, you'll always start with a tree. You need to have at least one tree before you can have other animals or smaller plants because most of the cards in the game need to be attached to a tree. Many cards are divided into two halves, some split horizontally, some vertically. You can only use one half of a card. When you play such a card, you tuck half of it under a tree, revealing only the half that you want to use. A tree normally can have at most 4 cards attached - top, bottom, left and right.

This wolf is one of the animal cards. The number 3 at the top left means to play this card you need to pay 3 cards. The three rows of icons at the bottom mean the following: (1) When you play this card, draw a card for every deer icon in your forest. (2) The cart type of the wolf is red. When you play the wolf, if the three cards you use as payment are all red too, you enjoy this bonus. This circular arrow means you take an extra turn. (3) In Forest Shuffle acorn means points. The wolf scores 5 points for every deer icon in your forest. 

This flower doesn't give you any points, but if you have it, every time you play a tree, you get to draw a card. 

Usually the cards in the shared forest keep growing. Whenever it exceeds 10, they are all discarded. Your hand limit is 10 too. If you reach that, you can't draw any more cards. 

During game setup, three winter cards are shuffled into the bottom half of the deck. The game ends when the 3rd winter card is drawn. 

The Play

Every card in the game has a scoring ability. When it is your first time playing, there is a lot of reading to do. Most of the cards are effectively two cards. You need to read both halves. In addition to your own cards, you also need to read the cards in the shared forest, and also in your opponents' forests. My first big realisation was the importance of not giving away cards which my opponents wanted. You need to be careful what cards you use as payment, because they are going to go to the shared forest. One tactic is waiting for the shared forest to get almost full. Then you can pay with several cards which your opponent wants to push the shared forest over the limit. All the cards will then be discarded. 

There are many different scoring criteria. I think some are better than others. Some cards score a fixed number of points. Some score points based on other cards. The fixed points ones are less attractive to me, because I prefer those with more potential. It's no guarantee though. You might not get enough of the right cards to help you score many points, and also others may be competing with you. So it's not only about the cards themselves, it's also about your opponents' actions. 

I noticed that we tended to accumulate many cards, until our hands were almost full. The reason was we wanted to delay letting our opponents know what kind of cards we were going to play. This was so that they would not know what cards not to put into the shared forest. Sometimes we had many cards in hand simply because we were stuck with cards we didn't want to play and also didn't want to release into the shared forest.

Drawing a card from the deck is always a little exciting. There are so many different cards in the deck, it's like playing gacha. 

When the winter cards start appearing, the countdown begins. Gradually there will be more and more pressure to play all the cards you have been planning to play, before time runs out. 

I focused on two specific types of trees. One would score points if I had at least four of them. The other scored more and more points for each additional tree I had. 

Allen had a type of animal which scored 5 points for every full tree. He had three of these animals, which meant every full tree scored him 15 points. He had 5 such trees, so that meant 75 points! Our points went beyond 200. 

The Thoughts

My first impression of Forest Shuffle was this: this is just a whole bunch of scoring criteria lumped together. You are just picking some to work on, and you collect cards to make them count. You collect the same tree species, or you collect a variety of tree species; you collect butterflies; you collect a combination of wolves and deer; you collect foxes and hares; and so on and so forth. It seems a little dull to me. You are just collecting related cards so that you maximise your scores, while at the same time trying not to let your opponents collect the cards they want. 

After playing a bit more, I warmed up to the game a little because of the setting and the artwork. There are so many animals and plants to discover, and the art is beautiful. It is satisfying when you manage to collect big sets. How the various animals and plants score points really don't have much to do with what they are. Well, maybe except for those predator and prey combinations. Which scoring criteria is assigned to which specie is quite arbitrary. There is little aggression among players. Sometimes you compete for the same types of cards, but you don't directly harm your opponents. 

I played a bit more, and eventually decided this is just a bunch of scoring criteria after all. I am okay to play but it is not very interesting to me after I'm done admiring the artwork. Many Eurogames have this kind of multiple scoring criteria, just that the mechanisms for collecting cards or resources are different. In Forest Shuffle the mechanism is quite simple and not particularly interesting. 

Rainforest City

The Game

Rainforest City is a game from Singaporean designer Daryl Chow. It is a game about nature and developing habitats. It has an educational element. Players build rich habitats and fill them with plants and animals to score points. They set up food chains. The game is played over a fixed number of rounds. The highest scorer at game end wins. 

These are the tokens in the game. Those numbered 1 are plants. Those numbered 2 are herbivores, and they need to eat plants. They can only survive (i.e. score points) if they are supported by a plant in the same habitat. The tokens numbered 3 are the carnivores, and they in turn need to be supported by herbivores. The background colours represent the terrain types these plants and animals live in - forest, sea or marshland. The otter is a special type of carnivore which can live on any terrain. 

At the start of every turn the centre of the table must be set up like this. There are four sets of two cards each. There are two types of cards - terrain cards and animal cards. Two of the sets will have one card of each type (in the photo above, those two sets on left and right). One set will have two terrain cards (the set at the bottom). One set will have two animal cards (top). The active player may choose any set. To choose a set, he must turn the central dial so that his fruit (every player is assigned one) points at the set he wants. The dial determines which sets the other players get access to. The other players may pick one from the two cards they have access to. 

When claiming a terrain card, you must add it to your territory. Connected squares of the same terrain type in your territory form habitats, and when you do final scoring, it is done separately for each habitat. Terrain cards usually come with some free tokens. 

When claiming an animal card, you don't add it to your territory, but you'll get to place tokens. Tokens must be placed following the pattern shown on the animal card. Also the terrain type must match your territory. If you are unable to place an animal (or plant), there is a penalty. This can be because you don't have the matching terrain, or the position where you are supposed to place a token is already occupied. In this photo above, I was able to place all three tokens. 

Here is how tokens score points. All the number 1 tokens score 1 point by default. These are plants. Each plant supports one herbivore within the same habitat (connected group of same terrain type). If a habitat has two plants and three herbivores, only two of the herbivores will score points, because you don't have enough plants. Similarly, each herbivore supports one carnivore. The 3 points of a carnivore is lucrative, but they are not easy to score. You need to set up the whole food chain. 

Some terrain cards have houses, i.e. human habitat. These are worth 3 points each, so that's attractive. However when you pick a card with a house, it forces you to discard a specific token. Also if you place any token next to the house, you lose 1 point per token. 

I had a large sea habitat (blue), and it had three dolphins. However only one of them scored 3 points, because I only had one fish. So I could only support one dolphin. 

This is used when playing the advanced game. If you fulfil a specific condition, you score bonus points. 

The Play

I played Rainforest City with my old friends when we went on a gathering trip to Ipoh. Chee Seng brought the game. Chee Seng has played many different boardgames, although he's not as crazy as I am about them. Cherng Liang is not really a gamer and doesn't play often. The three of us are at different points on the gamer spectrum. For Chee Seng and I, the game was pretty straight-forward. However Cherng Liang complained why we picked something so complicated to play. However he went on to win the game. So it's not really that complicated. He was just not accustomed to playing games like this. 

We played quite many games during our trip to Ipoh

I would say a big part of Rainforest City is a solo game. Or multiplayer solitaire. You build your own little kingdom and your opponents can't really mess with you. The player interaction in the game comes from how you pick cards when you are the active player. Your choice determines the options available to your opponents. If you think you are going to give options which are too good to them, you can intentional make a suboptimal move for yourself for the sake of not benefiting your opponents too much. We didn't really play that way. We mostly focused on just optimising our own moves. If you want to, you can examine what animals and plants your opponents may want, and avoid giving them what they want.  

In our game, Chee Seng's fruit (i.e. player icon) and mine are on opposite ends of the central dial. That means in the early game when we tended to want two terrain cards on our turns, we were forcing the other to pick from two animal cards. Cherng Liang's fruit was 90 degrees from ours, so on our turns he was able to pick from one terrain card and one animal card. Maybe that's why he eventually won. 

My kingdom towards late game. 

The player icons: rambutan, durian, banana and mangosteen. 

The card backs of the three types of cards form a montage

The Thoughts

Rainforest City is a light to mid weight family game with an educational element. You learn a little about the environment and the ecosystem. The player interaction is low, and you can peacefully develop your own little kingdom. If you are the competitive type, you can still play that way by paying more attention to your opponents' play areas and watching out for what they need. Optimising your play within your play area does give your brain a little jog, but overall I'd say the game is pretty straight-forward. Primary school children will be able to handle it. So this is a good educational tool. 

Petal Plotters

The Game

Petal Plotters is a game from Malaysian game designer Evan Cheah, winner of the Malaysian Boardgame Design Competition in 2023. It is a small-box microgame using only cards. The garden is on the brink of war, and you have to decide whose side to be on. The grasshopper? The snail? The monkey? If you successfully pick the ultimate victor, you win the game. 

At the start of the game, deal all cards out to the players. You then take turns playing a card to manipulate the end game. When everyone has just one card left in hand, the game ends. Your last card is the faction you have chosen. If the end game situation meets the condition on that card, you win. 

When you play a card, there are two ways you can use it. You can play it face-down before you. Every card has two numbers, one at each end, and usually one is positive and the other negative. When you play a card face-down before you, you must choose one of these numbers. When the game ends, the numbers on all the cards played by all players are added up. This is the outcome of the war - it's going to be a number. The condition on your faction card will be along the lines of this total being less than zero, more than eight, more than 12, and so on. So during the game you try to influence the total, while your opponents are doing the same. Since cards are played face-down, you don't know what the others have played. 

That brings us to the other use of a card. You may play a card face-up to use its special power, after which the card is discarded. Special powers can help you see the face-down cards played by your opponents. They can also help you manipulate the end game total. E.g. one card lets you look at an opponent's card, another one forces everyone to pass one card to the left. The drawback of playing a card for its special power is you won't be able to keep it face-down before you to add or subtract from the total. From your opponents' perspective, there is less hidden information they need to worry about.

At game end, all the face-down cards are flipped over, and you sum up the card values. The last card you keep is your faction card. If the sum meets the condition on your faction card, you win. Sometimes more than one player meet their conditions. Among the conditions there is a ranking based on how difficult it is to fulfil them. The player with the higher ranking wins. 

The Play

This is a short game, but by no means a simplistic game. A card has four uses. I count the two different numbers as two different uses. When you get your hand of cards, you have to think hard how best to make use of your cards. You have to plan which card to leave to the end as your faction card. You will normally want to keep your options open for as long as possible. At the same time your card plays should help you towards the eventual faction you pick. As you observe your opponents play, you want to guess their intentions because their plays affect the end game total. You have to decide how best to make use of the card special powers. This is a compact game with much to think about. You have many options, and you must choose wisely. You have to pick some and forgo others. This is the dilemma you face. 

The Thoughts

Petal Plotters may be a short microgame, but it is a thinky game. You need to read your opponents to guess whether they are adding or subtracting from the total. You have limited actions to manipulate the total and gather information. There are tough decisions to be made.  

I have heard that some do not like the art. I was surprised by that. Indeed the art is not typical of the type of art used in boardgames, but I think that's a good thing. I find the art beautiful and the box cover attractive. We should push boundaries. The graphic design is functional, and the art doesn't hinder gameplay. When LUMA published Petal Plotters, it was the first game in the Tropika series. This series has nature as the theme, and I'm looking forward to more games.