The World Game

This is an educational game, and it'll teach you about all the countries of the world. It is a card game. Every card is one country. On it you will find information like the capital, the population, the area and the number of neighbouring countries. 

This is a game for 2 to 3 players. You start the game by having everyone draw 20 cards from the deck. You hold all 20 cards in your hand as your own personal deck. At any point you only look at information on the first card facing you. That is your current country. During play, you try to win cards from your opponents. The game is played until someone loses all cards. At that point whoever has the most cards wins. 

On your turn you have two options. You compare stats, or you declare a challenge. If you want to compare stats, you announce one of the features on your card, e.g. the population. Everyone then shows their cards, and whoever has the highest number in that feature takes all the cards. The cards are added to the back of the winner's deck. This is how you win cards from your opponents. 

If your current country is a small one, you'd be at an advantage when comparing stats. You can decide to declare a challenge instead. When you do so, you pick a person to issue a challenge. It doesn't have to be yourself. The person who issues the challenge tests the knowledge of everyone else. If the question can be answered correctly, the first person to do so wins cards. If no one gets it right, the person who asked the question wins the cards. You can ask things like the capital, or which continent the country is in. You can show the flag and ask which country it belongs to. You can also ask where exactly the country is. The game comes with a world map, and you can point at the country on the map. The map itself is only labelled with numbers, not country names. 

My sister Mei bought this game for her 11-year-old son Oswald as a Christmas present. This is very much what you would imagine a parent buying for their child. It's something educational. My sister is not that keen about playing boardgames. When they visited Kuala Lumpur recently, they brought along the game so that Uncle (me) can teach Oswald how to play. The rules are pretty straight-forward. However, five minutes into playing, I was already itching to change the rules (sigh... game designers...). Based on the rules that come with the game, if the players are roughly equal in their knowledge about countries around the world, the game may drag for a long time. They will win cards from one another at about the same rate. It's not easy for one player to completely bankrupt another. Well, I might be wrong, since we didn't finish a game using the prescribed rules. I suggested that when we won cards, we could set them aside as a score pile, instead of adding them to the back of our deck. That way the game has a finite end. You'll play 20 turns, because everyone has 20 cards to start with. 

This game reminds me of Top Trumps which I used to play when I was little. I remember I have a deck with tanks, and one with battleships. The carriers were the biggest and often won. The submarines were the weakest. 

Fauna

Plays: 3Px3.

The Game

Fauna is a animal trivia family game. Every round players try to guess the habitat, weight, height or tail length of an animal by placing cubes in regions on a world map, or in sections on scales for weight / length. Only the common name, scientific name and picture of the animal for a round is displayed. Players need to make their guesses based on this information. Players take turns making guesses, and after everyone is done with committing guess cubes, the answers are revealed. Correct guesses earn you points, and so do guesses which are close to the correct answers (but they don't score as many points). Incorrect guesses are penalised - the guess cubes are to be surrendered. However before the next round starts, everyone gets one cube back. If you have fewer than three, you replenish up to three.

The game ends when a player reaches a certain number of points, which depends on the number of players.

Shee Yun (7). The game board is mostly a world map, and it has three scales at the bottom, for weight, body length/height and tail length.

Playing this game makes me feel like a zookeeper. The English version of the game has both metric and imperial scales.

Chen Rui (5). During the guessing phase of a round, the animal cards are placed in this holder, so that only the upper half (with animal name and picture) is showing.

A fully revealed animal card. The answers are in the bottom half.

The Play

Gameplay is simple and quick. When you have a commonly known animal which everyone is familiar with and has a good idea of the answers, it becomes a race to claim the right spots with the correct answers, starting with the highest scoring points. Correct answers on the scales give 7pts, and close-to-correct answers give 3pts. However the point values of regions on the map depend on how widely spread the animal habitat is, the fewer regions, the higher the value per region (and per adjacent region).

When an obscure animal comes up, every player must still place at least one guess cube. Then it will become a different race - hoping to claim a (hopefully) safe spot before it is taken.

Watching how others place their cubes can help you. If they appear confident and know what they are doing, you may want to consider placing your cube next to theirs. If they are right, you'd get to claim the close-to-correct points. However sometimes this can backfire, because confident placements can sometimes be completely wrong.

The map is divided more by terrain type / ecological region than by country.

I bought the game to be played with the children (7 and 5), and they like it. Naturally I have an advantage, but I try to give them hints sometimes, e.g. when they think a horse is about 50kg, I ask them do you think a horse is lighter than your father? They need guidance on length and weight, so I often need to tell them things like 2 metres is a little taller than me, or 1 ton is about the weight of an elephant (I think) (I guess we'll know when we come to the elephant card). I bought a measuring tape to keep with the game, which will be helpful to the children.

It's funny how some of the answers surprised me. There was a horse that had a Polish-sounding name. I tried to be helpful and pointed out to the children that Poland is in eastern Europe. It turned out the horse's habitat is not Poland at all. Oops. I hope they didn't think I was trying to deceive them. It was also funny to come across animals like the Indian Python. The Indian Python comes from India of course?! I did hesitate a little whether "Indian" meant "Red Indian", which would be on a completely different continent. It was fun to learn about the animals. Some information on some commonly-known animals surprised me, e.g. the habitat of camels. The game corrected some of my misconceptions about widely-known animals.

The Thoughts

Fauna is very much a family game. It will work with casual gamers too. It's not something hardcore gamers will pore over. Knowledge of animals certainly helps, but the game mechanism allows you to leverage on the knowledge of other players. I don't think the game should be played very competitively. I enjoy making correct guesses and learning about animals more than outscoring my opponents.

There are 360 different animals in the game. That is one huge stack of cards. Cards are double sided, the green edged side for easier-to-guess animals, and the black edged side for harder-to-guess animals. One game uses about 7 animals, so it will take quite some time to see all the animals. I guess it would be easy to make an expansion containing new cards. Maybe even do a Flora expansion adding plants and trees.