Beast is a hidden movement game, designed by Aron Midhall, Elon Midhall, and Assar Pettersson, and published by Studio Midhall. As many Kickstarter darlings are, it’s an absolutely gorgeous production. The box art depicts a massive hydra before a lone warrior, weapon drawn. The scene promises an epic encounter with a mystical beast, a foe that needs to be overcome in the depths of the forest. The characters are lovely acrylic standees, and the board is littered with gold highlighted screen printed critter meeples (sheep, boars, and bears). The art on the cards is dark and mysterious, and each beast feels like it has an entire mythos behind them. A fable, passed down in whispers around campfires from generation to generation, which is exactly the feeling you want from this game.

The gameplay, on the other hand, is plodding at best. Beast is all about a hidden movement dance. You’ve got these hunters, dreaming of glory, and a beast, sneaking around like a Predator. In its mind, you’re already dead, you just haven’t realized it yet. But wait, it’s not all excitement and epic clashes. You know that feeling when you’re stuck in traffic, and it’s like the universe is conspiring against your progress? That’s how Beast makes me feel. It’s slower than a molasses, drafting cards and deciding on which top and bottom actions to use takes longer than trying to start a fire with nothing but a stick and string. You saw it work in a movie once, right?

Beast should be simple and straightforward. Players draft a hand of action cards, add them to their hand of personal cards, then, on their turn, play one or two cards and execute the actions on the cards. But Hunters need to confer with each other on what each player can do, and what they think the beast can do, all while be beast player sits by, smirking, or, bored out of their skull waiting for their turn to do anything. Then, when all the hunters have finally executed their turns, it’s finally the beast players turn to make the table wait while they consider every possibility. After every beast turn, the hunters need to re-confer with each other, as each action they take is precious. There’s a lot of time just spent considering everything that you as a player can do, and trying to guess at what your partners and opponents can accomplish on their turns.

The dance between the beast and the hunters is exciting at first. As the beast slinks in the shadows, circling its prey, the hunters take their first tentative steps out of their villages, moving in the direction they think the beast has moved to. Very quickly, it becomes clear that this dance is actually a frustrating game of cat and mouse. Each of the hunters can move one or maybe two steps with each of their cards, while the beast seems to get 2 to 4 movement on average. On the face of it, that doesn’t seem that bad, but at the end of the day, the hunters can move 10ish spaces between them, while the beast player can move like 12 spaces all on their own. Ideally, the hunters are spread out to cover more ground, but this leaves at least one hunter removed from the action, taking an entire day to cross the map only to have the beast slip by them going in the other direction.

I was endlessly frustrated by the hide and seek mechanics. There were scenarios where I had 100% logically deduced where the beast was, and was standing on that same spot, and had attack cards in my hand, but because I didn’t hold a card with the ‘seek’ keyword in my hand, I couldn’t reveal the beast to attack it. In contrast to that, the only thing the Beast needs to do to attack is to play one of those attack cards. Doing so, reveals their location, but to become hidden again, all they have to do is simply move again. It feels unfair for the hunters to require a keyword to find the beast when the beast doesn’t need a keyword to hide again. Coupled with my criticism above where the beast generally has so much more movement options than the players, it makes for a slippery and frustrating experience.

Beast gives both the hunters and the beast player plenty of tools to cut their own path. For every strategy, there’s a counter. For every boon one side gets, there’s a way for the other side to mitigate it. For the beast, it’s not terribly difficult to accrue enough grudge to be fully evolved and have all their skills unlocked by the final night. With all of your skills at your disposal, the beast is exponentially stronger than it was at the start of the game. The hunters, on the other hand, struggle to gain enough grudges to unlock any of their abilities. Add to that, the grudges are used to activate most of the items that are needed to counter the beastly talents. And yes, many of the beastly talents also cost grudges, but the Beast has so many more options to earn grudges over the course of a single day. The opportunity cost for using a grudge for the hunters is significantly higher doing similar things as the beast player.

I found the asymmetry of the beast and the hunters to be odd and frustrating. The beast gets grudges for killing the critters on the board, but the humans don’t get grudges for hitting the beast or killing its summons. If the beast kills one of the players, the beast gets to take one of their cards, and that player has to sit out for the rest of the round, but if the players hit the beast, then hitting the beast is the reward in itself. A lot of “I can do this, but you can’t” when explaining the rules continued to sow discord in my heart.

Speaking of dying, while there isn’t true player elimination in Beast, it’s possible for players to be knocked out of a whole day. In our most recent game, Bigfoot died on the third day, and was forced to just sit, and spectate. Maybe they can make suggestions for what the remaining two hunters should do, but still. Relegated to the sidelines, no agency of their own. Defeated hunters do recover at the dawn of the next day, but when each day takes at least 30 – 45 minutes to play through, that’s a lot of time to wait around with nothing to do.

One time, near the end of a round, I played the last card of my hand, and ended my turn on a town. Then the beast moved two spaces with their last card, ending their turn on my spot, revealing themselves, but with no one with any cards remaining, the round came to an end. As an upgrade, the beast spent their grudges to improve their damage, and then in the following day, the beast (who always gets the first action), used their first action to attack me, and consumed one of their ancient power to increase their attack, dealing a whopping 3 damage to me, knocking me out for the entirety of the final day. Not only did the beast get to steal one of my cards as a reward for killing me, but now the beast had 6 less hunter actions to worry about. I honestly stepped away from the table at that point, as I was done and out for the rest of the game. I had no investment to watch the song and dance of the beast and the remaining two hunters for the next hour. When a game has players disengaged and walking away from the table, that’s trouble.

I understand why all of these aspects exist, and for those who love the game, I fully understand why. For every complaint about a mechanic I have, there’s a good reason for that mechanic to exist. There’s always a strategy that I could pursue to face my struggles, and these problems I have with Beast will probably fade away with experience. I appreciate games that reward repeat plays, but I really struggle when my first impression of a game is so sour. It’s got such potential buried under layers of frustration, an the uneven playing field is rife with leaving first time players with a bad impression. For those who love Beast, I’m so glad you found your joy, but personally, it’s a game that I’m moving on from, and won’t be looking back.