The Evolution app recently launched the Climate expansion, which adds significant changes to the Evolution landscape. If you haven’t already, you can check out my thoughts on the base game of Evolution here!
What’s Different?
Evolution: Climate adds a weather mechanic that really comes into play during the food phase. All the cards that were discarded to seed the feeding pool now may influence the climate as well, shifting the ecosystem into either a new ice age, or a deadly heatwave. In colder climates, less vegetation is available and small animals perish easily. On the hot end of the spectrum, vegetation is plentiful, but the largest animals can’t handle the heat. On both sides of the climate board lay events that may get triggered and will all the animals, or the ecosystem dramatically.
Of course, with this new mechanic comes many more traits that allow you to mitigate the effects of the weather, at the expense of taking up one of your precious trait slots. Do you want to evolve Cooling Frills to survive in heat? Is it worth replacing your Hard Shell, potentially leaving you open to carnivores? You’ll need to adapt to survive!
The smaller, but just as important changes are that players all now draw one more card by default, and each species can hold 4 traits instead of just 3. This gives you space to add a climate trait, but the situation may demand you evolve along a different path. Also, if you’ve spent some time with just the base game, a few of the previous traits have been modified to negate some of the climate effects as well (such as Burrowing preventing some population lost due to heat and cold effects).
How is it?
The base game of Evolution had players struggle against the threat of hungry carnivores, and against the dwindling food supply. Evolution: Climate adds yet another threat to manage. As before, you can push your luck and play traits that primarily assist you in getting food, but eschewing your defence or neglecting to acclimatize to the shifting weather patters will lead to your extinction.
The climate marker only moves one space up or down each round, and with most games lasting between 6 and 8 rounds, the odds of hitting the ends of the track seems fairly limited (but not impossible). As expected, hitting the very ends of the climate track and trigging extreme temperatures can spell disaster for everyone involved. The available food plummets, all creatures suffer massive population loss, and the odds of trigging one of the cataclysmic events rises.
Wildfires, Volcanic Eruptions, and even Meteorites are all options if you let the ecosystem get hot enough
The Climate expansion does add a lot more variability to an already very variable game. Personally, I feel like it adds just a bit too much randomness, as your ability to control the weather is fairly low. Because the weather modification is tied to the same card that you use to seed the pond, it’s not uncommon for you to be in a bit of a pickle; you need to add food to the board, but the only card that adds food also makes it colder. Generally you’ll find yourself picking the lesser of two evils and then trying to adapt to survive.
That said, I do enjoy another threat being added that can punish an overly aggressive player. If the heat rises, larger animals begin to die. Carnivores depend on their large body size to eat their prey, which can give a player who has mustered an army of small rats a bit of a fighting chance.
Evolution: Climate is a great addition to an already great game. The new mechanic offers considerable depth with very little rules overhead. Evolution‘s mechanics already produce an emergent narrative, and Climate only adds to that story. I can’t help but think about the tale where my populous, but small animals narrowly avoided being chomped on by an overzealous carnivore, only to be saved by a sudden heat wave driving the carnivore into extinction.
As I said before, the Evolution app is simply excellent, and the Climate expansion adds even more content to play with. I really enjoyed my time with the app, especially because I have absolutely no qualms about becoming a carnivore and tearing into AI flesh. If you’re a fan of Evolution, adding Climate is a no-brainer!
Number of (physical) plays: 6 Designers: Dominic Crapuchettes, Dmitry Knorre, and Sergey Machin Artists: JJ Ariosa, Giorgio De Michele, Catherine Hamilton, and Kurt Miller Release Year: 2014 Mechanics: Hand Management, Direct Conflict, Secret Unit Deployment Publisher: North Star Games
Introduction
When I’m not playing board games at a table, I’m often playing digital implementations of board games. And because I crave discoverability and am always trying new games, my ‘Games’ folder on my phone has slowly grown out of control.
In 2019 North Star Games released the Evolution Board Game app for Android and iOS, bringing their hit 2014 title designed by Dominic Crapuchettes, Dmitry Knorre, and Sergey Machin into the digital age. The app launched ‘free’ and allowed players to sample the core game. With a robust tutorial, 10 missions of the campaign, and one online multiplayer game per day, it was much more generous than many other apps that demand money upfront, or offer a severely stripped down demo.
I installed Evolution as soon as it became available and played through the free campaign. I had enjoyed the physical game previously, even if it had a tendency for players to pick on the player who falls behind.
North Star Games hasn’t let this app become stagnant. Over the past two years, it’s received a multitude of updates, including Single Player Weekly Challenges, Monthly Tournaments, a Pass and Play mode, various new traits, Asynchronous play, and a ton of bug fixes. In addition to all these new features that have been added, one of my favourite aspects of Evolution is cross-platform play. I love apps that let me play with my friends, no matter their chosen device.
The full game (which includes the rest of the campaign and unlimited online matches) in unlocked via a single In-app purchase. This means if you generally share your purchased apps with members of your family via Google’s Family Library feature, each member will need to pay for the full game individually.
How to Play
I’m writing this section from the perspective of playing the game at the table.
Evolution’s gameplay revolves entirely around cards. At the beginning of each round players draw trait cards into their hand (3, plus 1 more for every species they control). Each player must discard one card (face down) to seed food into the central feeding pool, then in player order, may play a trait card (face down) to any of their species to give them a competitive advantage in the ecosystem, or discard a card to grow their species’ population or body size. Players can also discard a card to create a whole new species. Each animal can only have 3 unique traits at a time, but traits can be replaced; they aren’t necessarily permanent.
The first rounds usually have plenty of food for everyone
After everyone has had a chance to play cards to grow and evolve their species, the face down food cards are revealed and players have to start living with the consequences of their decisions. All the trait cards are flipped face up (and are now active), and beginning with the starting player, may feed one of their species. Herbivores take food from the shared central pool while any animals with the Carnivore trait eat other species around the table (Carnivores must have a larger body size than their prey).
Once all animals have fed as much as they can, the collected food is deposited into a bag (to be revealed at the end of the game) and a new round begins. If any species collected less food than their population, their population is reduced (and could go extinct if no food was gathered).
If the deck runs out of cards during the the deal cards phase, the end of the game is triggered. Players finish the round as normal, then score one point for every food in their bag and one point for every trait and population on your species that managed to survive until the bitter end.
Review
Playing Evolution with your friends can be dangerous. While the first round or two is a utopia, with plenty of food to go around, and a gaggle of herbivores happily growing their populations and evolving traits that allow them to harvest food more quickly than the others. The tenor of gameplay changes the second you see someone build up their body size and play a face down trait. Suddenly you find yourself double-guessing your friends. “Did they just develop a taste for flesh? Do I play the Long Neck trait or the Hard Shell trait? One will defend me, while the other gives me more food…”
Only after all players have had a chance to grow their population and body sizes are the traits revealed. This is such an exciting moment of the game where everyone’s strategies are laid bare. Taking the risk to gather more food (which is points at the end of the game) while eschewing defenses can be lucrative. At the same time, seeing a poorly defended animal gives incentive to other players to grow fangs and take a pound of flesh for themselves.
Evolution is rife with player interaction, and it manifests dramatically as soon as someone turns into a Carnivore. Suddenly everything feels scary and you scramble to build a defense. Warning Calls, Burrowing, and Climbing are all useful ways to ensure your precious creatures don’t become someone else’s snack.
Personally, I enjoy Evolution, but it almost always leaves me feeling just a bit sour, due to the fact that sometimes the best option is to kill someone else at the table, or, someone else has evaded my defenses and drove me into extinction. I’ve said before that I’m a conflict adverse player so it should be no surprise that playing a game with carnivores and tearing into my friends doesn’t exactly illicit joy in my heart. However, playing against AI opponents is an entirely different; there are no hard feelings when playing a cold, heartless robot.
The easy AI is real easy
Playing the Evolution app is a perfect way to enjoy this game design. The animations are fast and snappy, the AI ‘thinks’ quickly, and holding each of the cards brings them up on the screen for easy reading. The End Turn button even requires that you hold it for a few seconds to resolve the dreaded “mis-click”, which is a stroke of UX genius.
The first 10 missions (which are available for free) of the campaign ease you into playing. They keep some of the advanced traits out of the first few games, and even present you with situations to teach you some unconventional strategies (such as using the Intelligence trait to attack a species, which reduces its population, making its Defensive Herding trait useless, allowing you to attack it a second time).
Because the animations are fast, and the AI doesn’t slow the game down, it’s so easy to blaze through game after game of Evolution. I’m much more willing to explore different strategies when the time commitment is reduced down to mere minutes.
Between pass & play, cross play between devices, AI solo games with various AI levels, campaign, and weekly challenges, I have to admit that the Evolution app has everything that I look for in a digital board game adaption, AND the game itself is excellent! Take care that you don’t play the app too much, lest you become an Evolution master and crush your friends the next time you play the game in-person.
Mechanics: Dice Rolling, Modular Board, Direct Conflict
It’s always fascinating when a piece of media tries to cross barriers between genres. I’m thinking of games such as Bloodbowl, which marries a strong fantasy setting with American football, or Forgotten Waters which leans heavily on story telling and role-playing elements to elicit joy in players instead of strong or clever board game mechanisms.
Most people know what they like. Personally, I know that I do not enjoy horror or sports, so any media catering to fans of those genres is lost on me. People who really love story-telling and role playing generally won’t enjoy games that don’t tell a story (looking at you, dry economic train games). If we imagine each genre of game as a slice of the bigger ‘gaming pie’, we all on some level know which slices of pie we’ll enjoy the most.
The reason I’m talking about proclivities is because I know I am not a war gamer. I know for a fact that I don’t like games with a lot of direct conflict, nor do I relish in games that rely on chance for resolving outcomes. I cringe when games like Root and Oath hit our tables because I know that no matter how well regarded or praised a game is, I know that I don’t enjoy games that involve a lot of direct conflict (I’ll refer to these as ‘war games’ going forward).
Apparently the way my game group convinces me to play a direct conflict game is to downplay the more random elements; “Eclipse is barely even a war game” they said; “You only have one, maybe two battles in the whole game!” they claimed. With these comments in mind, I sat down at the table to play Eclipse: New Dawn for the Galaxy designed by Touko Tahkokallio.
How to Play
Eclipse: New Dawn for the Galaxy begins with every player situated on their own system with naught but empty space between them. In the centre of the table is the Galactic core with a big ‘ol baddie just waiting for someone to rush in, pummel them, and claim their lucrative spot.
On your turn you can take one of six actions: explore, influence, research, upgrade, build, and move. Each action requires a disc and usually has you spending some of your resources in order to gain something in return. Exploring allows you to put new tiles on the board, potentially connecting your system with the other players in the game and discovering planets that will net you more resources during the income phase. Influence allows you to move discs from the central play area to your own board, and back again. Research lets you spend your science resource to discover a new technology. Upgrade lets you reap the benefits of your research and equip your various ships with better weaponry and shields. Building costs materials, but puts ships onto any hex you control, and moving lets you move said ships into adjacent tiles.
Player board at the end of the first round
Action taking continues around the table until players decide to pass on further actions. Once all players have passed, the game moves into a combat phase. Any tile that contains more than one colour of tokens breaks out into combat. Players roll die according to their units initiative toresolve the combat. By default, a 6 is a hit and deals one damage. Upgraded weapons will deal more damage per each success rolled, computers will lower the number required for a hit, while shields raise the number required to hit your ships(6’s ALWAYS hit and 1’s ALWAYS miss). Once a ship has taken damage exceeding it’s hull strength, the ship is been destroyed.
Once all combat is resolved, players gain income based on the number of planets they’ve occupied. Finally, upkeep costs need to be paid based on the number of discs that you have out. Having completed this phase, the next round starts.
At the end of the game your score is derived from the points on the tiles on which you have a disc, any reputation tiles, any ambassador tiles, discovery tiles, monoliths, and your progress on the technology tracks. The player with the most points is the Supreme Galactic Ruler!
Review
The “How to Play” section above isn’t meant to be a comprehensive tutorial on how to play Eclipse. After all, the rulebook is 25 pages long and offers plenty of examples to help players navigate the considerable depth of rules. Board Game Geek’s forums also has a lot of discussion on some more edge-case rules questions, but it can be tricky to navigate as there were some rules changes and balance changes that happened between editions of the game and the expansions.
My friends weren’t lying when they said Eclipse is barely a war game. Rather, it is more of a resource management, economic game. As players take actions and spread their influence across the galaxy, they’ll be putting discs from their player board onto other things. The more discs you take off your track, the more money you’ll have to pay at the end of the round. If you can’t pay for your actions, you go bankrupt and may be forced to return some of your influence from the board to cover your shortfalls.
If I take any more actions, I’ll end up with a trade deficit But I won’t get very far on a single action per turn…
Like many games in the 4X genre (eXplore, eXploit, eXpand, eXterminate) the first couple of turns have players individually exploring the area around their home, gobbling up any resources to really kickstart their engines. While exploring, you may run into an neutral enemy called an ‘Ancient’. The Ancients aren’t terribly difficult to destroy (especially after a few researches and upgrades), but this is where the first instances of luck can start to make or break your Eclipse experience. It’s not unrealistic for one player to draw tiles that contain no threats and offer a variety of benefits. Plentiful planets, artifacts, and useful wormholes that make it easier to explore even more. To add to the momentum, artifacts can often give a player a bunch of resources that greatly assist them in their next few actions.
Conversely, If you explore and happen to find an Ancient, you’ll need to use a subsequent action to move some of your ships into that space. Then, after all players have finished taking actions and the game has moved into the combat phase, you’ll roll dice to resolve the combat. Assuming you win, you may put an influence disc in the sector and gain the rewards and/or place cubes on planets. It feels stifling to get surrounded by Ancients on your first few explore actions, while watching your opponents easily gobbling up planets left and right.
He who controls the centre, controls the universe
Eclipse is a resource management game, make no mistake. During each of your actions you move a disc off a track which dictates how much money you need to pay at the end of the round. If your actions exceed the amount you pay, you may end up going bankrupt. If your faction expands too far and you just happen to not find any orange plants (which increase the amount of money you generate at the end of every round), you may find yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place, deciding to go bankrupt and lose discs off sectors (which also return any cubes on planets to their tracks), or choosing to end your turn early.
Combat in Eclipse is anything but deterministic. Ships come in a variety of shapes and abilities and players can tweak their powers to fit each game. If you’re going up against someone who is very likely to hit, but does little damage with each success, you may want to improve your hull to survive multiple hits. Perhaps your opponent is a glass cannon; dealing 4 damage on every hit, but has no hull. In this case its worth investing in missiles, which only fire once per combat, but always shoot first. Of course, all of these modifiers and add-ons are locked behind specific technology tiles, which are randomly drawn at the beginning of every round, meaning sometimes the technology you really want just isn’t available, or the first player took it before you even had a chance. In addition to needing the technology to be available to buy, you need to pay for it using the science resource (pink). Hopefully during your explore actions you managed to find some pink planets to plop your cubes onto.
Bigfoot! Get out of my galaxy!!!
A lot of progress in Eclipse is cumulative; the more success you have early, the more you can do later. The more techs you research, the cheaper future techs are and the more upgrades you can slot onto your ships. The more sectors you explore the more cubes you’ll put onto the board which gives you more resources, allowing you to take more actions and buy more ships. It’s a pretty classic engine builder in that regard, including how your game can grind to a halt as soon as someone throws a wrench in your plans.
My most recent game showed a nasty edge of Eclipse. Otter had some bad luck with his explore actions right at the beginning of the game, leaving his starting hex adjacent to two Ancients. Simultaneously his neighbour Bigfoot explored right to the edges of his tiles, and laid them in such a way that Otter couldn’t reach the rest of the board, save for one single tile that he could use to reach the centre, that happened to have another Ancient guarding it. That tile was then quickly occupied by Bear (whose faction could occupy tiles guarded by Ancients), who promptly turned it into a stronghold, gating Otter into his own little sliver of space from which he could not escape.
Because Otter couldn’t explore, he was getting a paltry amount of resources during each income phase. He poured everything into defeating the Ancients and then trying to break down the gate setup by Bear. Unfortunately he just couldn’t compete with Bear who had access to twice as much space as Otter and was reaping the rewards that comes with colonizing that much space. His game was absolutely frustrating right from the first turn.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the downsides of randomness. I’ll give Eclipse credit where it’s due: the randomness does create very exciting and tense moments. In one game, I pushed my luck and attacked the centre tile on my second turn. Had I been successful, it would have set me up to absolutely dominate the game (I failed and ended up bankrupt, but that’s not the point of the story). In other games, factions build and prepare their ships until finally they crash into each other, each player rolling half a dozen die each, but sometimes a horrible upset can happen! A single starbase defending against a dreadnaught, or a pair of small cruisers dominating against a force three times their size.
Inevitably, the centre tile is a common battleground for the final round of the game as it ends up being easily accessed by everyone, and is worth the most points. I do love how the tension crescendos at the end of the game where suddenly players have nothing to lose and everyone strikes out for the final battles, trying to snatch poorly defended points away from their neighbors.
I’m not sure if Eclipse succeeds in satisfying both the Euro gamer crowd and the war gamer crowd. All the randomness I’ve listed above is more than enough to sour the experience of someone who doesn’t enjoy randomness in the first place. The action-efficiency puzzle/engine building aspect doesn’t seem like it’s something a war gamer would particularly enjoy; ‘senseless bookkeeping’ is the term that comes to mind.
That said, if you’re the type of person who can enjoy both sides of the gamer pie, Eclipse is a solid design. Highly dynamic gameplay, incredible replayability, and strategic depth that allows players to change their strategies from game to game (and allows other players the space to adapt and counter), all within a 3 hour play time! Eclipse has the potential to be a brightly shining star in your board game collection, if you can stomach the luck.
A pre-release review codewas provided by Direwolf Digital. I played the Steam version of The Fox and the Forest.
Trick taking games are a tale as old as time and have been ubiquitous throughout my growing up. My mom had a group of three other ladies who would gather and play Hearts until the wee hours of the morning. Later on in life, Euchre, Whist, and Spades were added to the rotation, with slight tweaks to the rules depending on who was joining the table that night and where they came from. As I got older, my family started playing Wizard during our reunions, and now we have reached the point where everyone in my family owns their own copy.
One thing most trick taking games have in common is that they often require three or more players. It is rare that a trick taking game works when only two players are at the table. Enter The Fox in the Forest by Joshua Buergel. The Fox in the Forest is a trick taking game for 2 players. No more, no less. Players are tasked with utilizing the cards in their hand to manipulate the game in order to win most of the tricks.
The Fox in the Forest offers a couple spins on the traditional trick-taking game model. First, there are only 3 suits available. Second, all of the odd cards have some kind of special ability that can spin the game in different ways, and third, you can earn a lot of points by losing nearly every trick.
How to Play
For anyone who hasn’t played a trick taking game before, some of these terms may be a bit foreign to you. Real quick talk about the core of almost all trick taking games – a trick is all the cards played in a round and ‘trump’ is the suit of cards that overpowers the other suits. In general, when the first player in a round ‘leads’ by playing a card, all subsequent players have to ‘follow’ by playing a card of the same suit if they have one. If someone doesn’t have a card of the lead suit, they’re free to play any card from their hand. Once all players have played a card, whoever played the highest card of the lead suit takes the trick, unless a trump card was played, in which case the player who played the highest trump card wins the trick.
With that out of the way, you now have the basic rules to dozens of games. What makes The Fox and the Forest special is how it takes that basic concept and offers clever wrinkles and ways to manipulate the game state. Let’s talk about what The Fox and the Forest does differently.
First, Each player is dealt 13 of the 33 card deck, with the remaining 7 cards being set aside as the draw deck. The top card of the draw deck is flipped faceup. The faceup card is called the Decree, and dictates which suit has ‘trump’.
The non-dealer player leads on the first trick of a round. After that, unless specified otherwise, the winner of the last trick leads the following trick. The leader can play any card from their hand without restrictions. The follower must play a card of the same suit as the leader if they have one.
In The Fox and the Forest every odd card has a special ability. Those abilities are resolved as soon as the card is played, before any other cards are played or tricks are resolved. Some will have you drawing and discarding cards, others will have allow you to change the decree cards, and others will let you lead the next trick if you lose this one.
Play continues until all the cards in your hand have been played. At the end of the round each player totals how many tricks they won, and earn points based off the chart below. In general, you want to win more tricks than your opponent, but don’t get greedy or you’ll be punished with a big fat 0 points.
Shuffle all the cards back together and deal out another round. Play continues until someone meets or exceeds 21 points.
Review
My experience with the physical game has been a story of hardship and trials. I played The Fox in the Forest half a dozen times against the same opponent over the course of the last two years, and in every game I get pushed around. I start off the hand doing well, snagging up the first four tricks with no resistance, only to be denied every trick thereafter through my opponent’s clever card play. Or somehow even worse, to be deliberately giving away tricks, trying to achieve the Humble status, only to have tricks forced into my hand, causing me naught but pain.
The Fox in the Forest is a lovely game for a pair of players. Only being a 33 card deck instantly makes this a contender for travel or playing while out of the homestead. The art on the cards is lovely, and the theme is calm and serene. If you really want to get into the story, Foxtrot has published the fairy tale that inspired this design over on their website. Even more portable than a 33 card deck is your phone with the newly published app.
Direwolf Digital is no stranger to making digital adaptions to board games. Root and Sagrada both have excellent apps that live up to the excellent quality of game as it’s cardboard counterparts, but also exudes charm with subtle animations and good UX choices.
I enjoyed playing The Fox in the Forest on my computer. The sepia toned forest background made me feel at ease, in the same way that a lovely autumn walk does. The flourishes of colour and light when ‘cards’ are placed imbues a semi-magical feeling. My only qualm with the interface is that you had to drag the card to play it, not simply click it. I can only imagine that during playtesting someone was the victim of errant mis-clicks and the decision was made to set dragging your card as the best way to play.
The in-game tutorial does a very good job of walking you through the first half of a game, explaining what’s necessary to get you started before leaving you to discover the nuance of the special abilities on your own. Beyond the tutorial you have options to play locally against the AI (no pass and play options at time of this writing). I tried two games against each of the 3 levels of AI and honestly didn’t notice much of a difference in difficulty. I managed to thoroughly trounce each one of them, earning myself 7 or 8 points per round. I’d say maybe I just got lucky, but my experience with the card game and getting utterly trounced over and over tells me there’s more needed to win than luck.
The Fox in the Forest also includes challenges. The challenges offer different scenarios that introduce new aspects to the core gameplay of The Fox in the Forest. The challenge “Might Makes Right” throws out the Humble victory condition and tasks you with getting as many tricks as possible. The “Meek Shall Inherit” challenge flips the script with the player earning between 4 and 6 of the tricks earning the bulk of the points. One scenario randomizes your cards after every trick, and another adds an entire other suit! Each of these challenges come in two difficulty levels and offers a fun twist to test your mettle and mastery of the trick taking system.
Over all, I enjoyed the digital implementation of The Fox in the Forest. It’s fast to play, pretty to look at, and doesn’t waste your time with overly egregious animations. The Fox in the Forest is kind of game best played in a cool morning with a hot cup of tea while you slowly rouse yourself from your slumber. Direwolf Digital has created a faithful implementation of the original game, and has even offered interesting challenges to shake up the experience so the app isn’t just a plain recreation of the physical version. I’m hopeful there will be some updates, possibly with more challenges or with the implementation of a local pass and play feature. I’m excited to explore the online mode when The Fox in the Forest launches on Steam, iOS and Android on October 18th.
A copy of Hamsters vs. Hippos was provided by the publisher
Number of Plays: 4
Game Length: 15 – 40 minutes
Mechanics: Press your luck, Player Elimination
Release Year: 2021
Designer: James Freeman, James Staley, Adam Staley
Artist: César Ayala Delgado
Publisher: Tin Robot Games
Intro
There are many famous rivalries in the animal kingdom. mongooses vs. cobras, lions vs. hyenas, and hares vs. tortoises are the first examples that spring to mind. Never in my life have I heard of the epic and lifelong battle that exists between hamsters and hippos.
Hamsters Vs. Hippos is a press-your-luck game by designers James Freeman, James Staley, and Adam Staley, with art by César Ayala Delgadoand published by Tin Robot Games. The goal of the game is to be the hamster that collects the most lotus flowers while avoiding the hippos lurking deep in the water.
How to Play
To begin, remove two of the hippo tiles from the rest of the tiles and shuffle the remaining tiles up. Lay the tiles out randomly on the table in a grid of 5 x 5 (for 1-4 players) or 7 x 7 (5-6 players). On the centre 9 tiles, place a single pink lotus flower. Each player chooses a hamster, takes the associated player board and you’re ready to play.
Setup for a 2 – 4 player game
On your turn you must move your hamster onto an unflipped tile. When you move onto an unflipped tile you collect any flowers sitting on the tile, then flip the tile and perform the action depicted on the tile.
Anytime after your first turn you may choose to bow out of the round. Remove your tile from the board and place all the lotus tokens you’ve collected onto your player board. These points are now permanently yours and cannot be lost.
If you don’t want to bow out of the round for your second action, you must take another move action, exactly the same way as the first action.
If you move and flip over a tile and reveal a hippo, your turn is immediately over and any points you’ve collected this round are lost. Play continues for the rest of the players until either all players have bowed out or a second hippo is revealed. Once that second hippo has been revealed all players who are still in the round are hippo food.
Once the round is over, you’ll shuffle a third hippo tile into the supply, and set up for another round. And for the third and fourth rounds, you’ll add a fourth hippo tile into the supply. After four rounds the player with the most lotus tokens in their permanent supply is the winner!
Review
I’ll talk about the production first. I received a pre-production review copy of Hamsters Vs. Hippos, so any aspect of this game could change over the course of the Kickstarter campaign.
The first thing that I noticed was the charming art on the cover. A cute hamster blissfully unaware of the looming danger of the hippo. I like how bright, cute, and colourful the art direction is, which encourages me to play with a younger audience. Once inside the box, you’re greeted with some very nice screen printed hamster meeples, and a tall stack of wonderfully thick tiles. While this massive stack is hard to shuffle, the thick cardboard tiles feel good in your hands.
Are they Hamster Meeples, or are they Mamples?
Each player gets a little player board with a hamster on it, holding a bag of their colour. This player board has a linen finish, giving it texture and a nice feel, but is made of very thin cardstock, almost the antithesis of the thick tiles. This isn’t much of an issue, as you’re not interacting with the player board much, just using it as a space to designate the tokens that you’ve cached from round to round. The lotus tiles are also quite small and thin; I found my sausage fingers had some amount of trouble picking them up deftly. Luckily for me, Hamsters vs. Hippos is not a dexterity game.
Hamsters vs. Hippos is a press-your-luck game about trying to collect the most points before choosing to bow out of the game to cache your goods. It may seem obvious that a press-your-luck game is incredibly luck dependent. Every time you choose to play more, you risk all of the progress you’ve made in the round up to this point.
In the case of Hamsters vs. Hippos, the word that comes to mind is ‘arbitrary’. Your first action in every round is to pick a tile to move onto; any tile along the outside will do. You have no information on which to base that decision, so you just end up picking the tile closest to your seat. Your second choice is much like the first – you now have 5 unflipped tiles surrounding your hamster, and you arbitrarily pick one to move onto and flip.
There is some vague feeling of strategy in choosing where you want to move to. Because you cannot move onto an already flipped tile, you try to maneuver your hamster in a way that leaves you with more than one unflipped tile available, while simultaneously trying to pin and corner your opponents. Beyond that consideration, you just choose your destination arbitrarily. Unless one of your tiles provides an option to peek under an adjacent tile, you have no information to base your decisions on. You just end up picking one, and hope there are no hippos in the water.
The Hamsters vs. Hippos tempo settles quickly. Move and flip, move and flip. We found that we stopped moving our hamster meeples in-between our actions. We’d just flip one tile, collect any rewards and/or settle any actions, flip the second tile, then place the hamster on the tile. Once we stopped moving the Hamster meeple, it became clear that the game of Hamsters vs. Hippos is just tile-flipping.
As tiles get flipped over and players start to accrue lotus flowers, you may be tempted to bow out of the round to ‘save’ all the goods you’ve collected thus far. The trouble that comes with that decision is that it feels bad to choose to stop playing. Further to that, if you’re not already in first place it feels like a losing move. Yes, you could stop early and save the flowers you collected, but if the the leader is still in the round it feels like they’re getting further and further ahead of you. It feels bad when you stop the round with 3 flowers and the person who was already in first place collects 8 before stopping. Not only are you no longer playing the game, but you’ve put yourself into an even worse position.
The mirror opposite to that situation is when you arbitrarily chose a tile to start on, and that tile turns out to be a hippo. You are immediately out of the round before you even began. Again, in press-your-luck games you’re supposed to weigh the odds of getting points versus the odds of losing it all, and sometimes you can just have bad luck and lose right off the bat.
The game is not altogether without tension. In one of my plays I was the player who got the first hippo tile relatively early. I sat and watched as my friends scurried across the pond, snatching up lotus tiles left and right. I willed the tiles to reveal a second hippo, and when the player in the lead loudly postulated “Should I just leave the pond? Ah, I’ll flip over one more tile!” and that tile was the second hippo, I let out an audible gasp. That tension quickly deflated as we realized that because no one else had bowed out, the whole round was basically a wash. Poor decision making on our part I suppose.
I can’t help but compare Hamsters vs. Hippos to press-your-luck games that I really enjoy. Can’t Stop (which I’ve already reviewed) and Incan Gold are two great examples that come to mind. In Can’t Stop you roll four die, pair them off, and move trackers up a board. Before you choose to roll you have information available to you, which numbers are still available, how far you’ve gone on each of the tracks, and the probability of rolling one of the three numbers you’ve chosen for the round. If your three numbers are a 2, 11, and 12, you’re probably going to choose to stop playing for the round, just because you know the probability of getting one of those three numbers is low.
Incan Gold asks players to voluntarily choose to stop playing in order to save all the gems they’ve gained thus far in a round, but players have more information available to them when they make that choice. First, as players adventure into the temple and loot gets left on the floor, you can see the reward for choosing to bow out of the game; you’re not JUST choosing to stop playing, but choosing to scoop up all the points that were left behind. Tension builds as you contemplate what others are doing, you weigh the benefits and risks as you try to out-think and out-maneuver your opponents. Incan Gold has some very exciting moments as players choose to leave on the same turn, forcing them to split the crumbs, or as one player is alone in the temple, presses their luck and scores big! When a threat card is drawn, it doesn’t end the game for just one of the players at the table, it signals that the end of the round could be imminent for all players.
Getting back to Hamsters vs. Hippos, I feel there is a element of player agency missing from this game. Because you have no information to base your decisions off of, you’re just flipping tiles and hoping that you don’t get the first hippo. In a 4 player game with a 5×5 grid, half the tiles aren’t in the game. The odds of 2 hippos being in the grid at all feels quite low. In a 5 or 6 player game and a 7×7 grid, nearly all the tiles are included, which does increase the tension a little bit, knowing that the hippos are definitely on the table. The downside of playing with 6 players is that 10 tiles get flipped in between each of your turns, making the odds of two hippos coming up within those 10 tiles not unreasonable.
All in all, Hamsters vs. Hippos is a cute and well produced game. My ‘core’ game group bounced off it, citing the lack of information available to influence their decisions, but I can see it being a fun game to play with younger kids. I’ll be seeing my 6 year old niece in a couple months, so once we play it I’ll update my opinion on it. I imagine she will have a lot of fun with it.
Let’s flash back to 2008. I was 17 and had just moved into my first apartment in Winnipeg, leaving behind the tiny village in northern Manitoba that I had called home for my entire life. I desperately needed a job to pay the rent for my super sketchy apartment, and the only place that would hire me was the local Pita Pit, paying minimum wage.
With the experience I got From Pita Pit, I moved onto other restaurant jobs, including Joey’s Only Seafood, Chesters Chicken, and Wendy’s. It wasn’t long before I was promoted to shift supervisor at Wendys. I took their training seriously and for two years it was a good enough job to keep my bills paid and food on my table. Unfortunately the training stopped and rather than waiting to move into higher management, I chose to pursue a diploma in Culinary Arts.
I left Wendys part way into my first year of college. When I left, I described working in fast food as ‘absolutely soul grinding’ and I couldn’t get out of that restaurant fast enough. Looking back on that period of my life, I have an odd sense of bittersweet melancholy. For some reason, I miss my Wendys. I’m sure I’m just lumping my time at that job together with a time in my life where I was excited about my schooling and all the new friendships I was developing.
It’s with those rose-coloured glasses that I picked up Food Chain Magnate. This was early in my gaming career and easily my most expensive game. With almost no information other than a fast food theme that I felt drawn to, I payed the $120 and brought it home. After all, I love food and restaurants, any game with this theme is sure to be a hit for me! How bad could it be?
How to Play
Food Chain Magnate is an economic game where the player with the most money wins. That’s the goal, make the most money, there are no alternate objectives, no prizes for having the best food or the most restaurants or the most brand recognition. The only thing that matters is money. Every round of Food Chain Magnate moves through its 7 phases, and if there is still money to be earned from the central bank, a new round is started. On and on it goes until the bank has been depleted and one player stands richer than the rest.
I’ll be honest, I wrote out a ‘how to play’ summary that ended up being nearly 2,000 words long. I’m going to wager that if you found yourself on this page, it’s because you already have an opinion on Food Chain Magnate and aren’t here to learn how to play. If you’re intrested in learning how to play, I’d recommend just reading the rulebook. It’s only like, 7 pages long and does an incredibly good job in laying out how to play in an easy to digest manner.
The gang’s all here!
I will say that playing Food Chain Magnate isn’t difficult for the average player. If you have someone who knows how to manage the phases and can shepherd the game along, most of your questions can be answered by just reading the cards. The trick comes in playing well.
Review
The first time I cracked Food Chain Magnate‘s box open and laid everything out on my table, it was almost too much to bear. I found a solo variant on Board Game Geek and slowly played it, spending the better part of an afternoon and a literal litre of coffee to learn how to play Food Chain Magnate.
The very first time I laid everything out on my table
Where I’m at now in my gaming career, and with 16 plays of Food Chain Magnate under my belt, I’m ready to argue that it’s actually not technically difficult. The flow of each round is smooth and the natural progression of the game eases players into the tempo. The tempo ramps up considerably, but it’s rare for something to happen that you didn’t expect or at the very least couldn’t see coming. Unless of course you’ve been playing on your phone during someone else’s turn, at which point I have no sympathy for you.
To begin my review proper, I need to say that while I just said that Food Chain Magnate isn’t a difficult game to play, it is HARD. Being a no-luck, perfect information game, Food Chain Magnate is merciless in its punishment. Splotter’s design philosophy is “if you can’t lose on the first turn, what’s even the point of turn one?”. Food Chain Magnate doesn’t care that a poor initial restaurant placement can sink your entire game, or that the person in the lead gets rewards for doing well and there is no welfare system in place to assist those who are struggling. It is absolutely, 100% the case that someone new to Food Chain Magnate playing at a table with a group of experienced players will get stomped into the ground and walk away from this experience with a poor taste in their mouth.
Decide if you’re planning for a short or long game before you even take your first turn
Listen, I love Food Chain Magnate. I love Splotter’s design philosophy and mostly agree with their train of thought of ‘no mercy’. I can tell you that I I don’t want all my games to require such careful considerations and harsh punishments. Food Chain Magnate isn’t a game I recommend to everyone, or even want to play every single day, but under the sharp shell lies a delicious puzzle where every thread you pull can have wild and drastic effects on gameplay.
Food Chain Magnate is one of the few games where I’ve actually sat and pondered what optimal openings exist and how to counter particular strategies right from the start. You see, aside from the 30+ possible employees, there are 16 milestones that everyone is racing towards. These milestones can be incredibly powerful, and missing out some of the key ones absolutely could cost you the game.
The Milestones
A milestone is claimed when someone fulfills it’s requirement. Everyone who managed acheive the milestone on the same turn gets to claim the milestone. That milestone then becomes ‘locked’ for the rest of the game, permanently unavailable for everyone else. This makes the first few turns of Food Chain Magnate critical. On one hand players can copy what everyone is doing to ensure you get access to the same milestones. On on the other hand if you do something completely different you may find yourself as the sole owner of a very powerful persistent benefit.
These milestones include things like a freezer that lets you store food (everyone else has to discard unsold food at the end of each round), adding $5 for every burger, pizza, or drink sold, granting you the ability to use multiple trainers on the same person, rocketing them up the corporate ladder, or permanently offering a $15 discount on salaries, allowing you to have talented staff early in the game. Some of these milestones are legendary, and exploiting properly them is the key to winning Food Chain Magnate.
The quiet before the storm
The very first turn of Food Chain Magnate sets the foundation for the rest of your game. Like a massive ship, it can be incredibly difficult to turn quickly or react to sudden changes. A food chain CEO needs to be like a ship captain. When a sailor sees trouble ahead, calls for the sails to be adjusted, the rudder gets cranked all the way to the side, and the massive ship turns very slowly. In Food Chain Magnate you need to anticipate and be ready for the demands of your guests. You need to be catering to their demands before they even knew they had demands. Just reacting to other players actions is a sure fire way to miss. If you’re planning your next turn’s productions based on the demands of the current round, then you’re already two turns behind.
The first turn of Food Chain Magnate can feel like a whimper. Each player gets to recruit one entry level employee. That’s not very exciting at all! Company growth is almost exponential, every employee that you add gives you another action, allowing you to control the situation on the board and hopefully earn the hard earned cash that will win you the game.
The employees
It’s difficult to see how the gears of Food Chain Magnate‘s mechanics are interlocked and how each action changes how each future action will be taken. Every player is trying to suss out your strategy and either build their own exploitive engine whose growth will eclipse yours, or try to undercut you and steal your business.
Turn order feels critical in every round. at the beginning Food Chain Magnate it’s incredibly advantageous to go last, as you have the ability to react to anything anyone else did on their turn, You can also use the fact that no one is after you to choose to do something completely different, knowing that no one has a chance to react. midway though the game however, it becomes critical to be first, as turn order is the tie breaker for almost everything, and Food Chain Magnate often comes down to ties.
Pricing wars in Food Chain Magnate are not uncommon, if you and an opponent are the same distance from a house that keeps demanding food, it’s tempting to lower your price as getting $4 per sale is better than making no sales at all.
So this begs the question, do you go the McDonalds route and try to sell one hundred million $4 burgers, or do you posture yourself as the cream of the crop, and only sell a dozen $40 burgers? All this will depend on your opponents, as everything they do will push and pull you, forcing you into a dastardly dance of capitalism.
One of the things I love about Food Chain Magnate is that every employee can be the one that wins you the game if you find yourself properly prepared and in the right situation. if two people are racing to the bottom in a pricing war, you can eclipse their profits by flooding the market with demand, and use the Luxuries Manager to boost your price by $10. Couple that with a garden and CFO and all you need is a handful of sales to make a lot of money.
I can keep going on and on about the various situations and how Food Chain Magnate creates fascinating scenarios, but I’ve rambled on for long enough. The long story made short is that Food Chain Magnate is a wonderful, brutal design. The tempo of the games grows organically and exponentially, and I never feel like the game obfuscated what the consequences of my actions are. Every mistake I make is my own fault. A two player game is a cutthroat knife fight as you battle for control of the 9 square hamlet. A 5 player game feels like an all out war, with all the treachery and backstabbing you’d expect from corporations fiercely competing to carve out a section of market share.
Food Chain magnate has no mechanisms to help those falling behind. If you make a mistake and it puts you a turn behind everyone else, you very well may be unable to ever catch up. It’s entirely up to you to make the best of the situation you created. This also has the effect of making someone feel like they’re ‘out of the game’ 30 minutes in, and it’s no fun to sit in a game watching everyone else vye for the crown for 2 hours. And personally, even if I’m doing well in a game, I feel bad when someone is disengaged and obviously not having a good time.
Another common criticism of Food Chain Magnate is with the art. A lot of people are turned off by the way this game looks, calling it boring or bland. Personally, I love the 1950’s aesthetic, tying in the golden age of advertising really drives home the theme. I also recognize that at the start of the game the board is very plain looking. I maintain that Food Chain Magnate has a lot of important information to convey to players and it’s simple design aesthetic was chosen to minimize the information overload for an easier play over-all.
That’s a lot of demands
Another point I really want to bring up is the playtime. Everytime I think about playing Food Chain Magnate, I wince at the time commitment. Food Chain Magnate feels like a four or five hour game. Lately I’ve been recording just how long games actually take to play, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the average game of Food Chain Magnate is only two and a half hours (with 4 players). Food Chain Magnate does an amazing job of giving you a board game experience full of decisions and interactions and depth in a relatively shorter playtime. I’ve played other games that take a lot longer to play and have significantly less interesting decisions to make.
All in all, Food Chain Magnate is a beast. It demands players think ahead and prepare for future rounds. It insists that you ebb and flow with your opponents, responding and reacting to what they’ll do, rather than just to try and build your own little corner of the map where no one can bother you. It creates amazing and interesting decisions throughout its entire playtime. Playing is a joy and every single time I open the box and start playing this game, I celebrate. I love Food Chain Magnate so much, my heart accelerates during play. If that isn’t the sign of truly enjoying a board game, I don’t know what is.
Food Chain Magnate is my #1 favourite game of all time, and it has been for years. I have a hard time fathoming enjoying another game more, between the theme and mechanics, Food Chain Magnate just sings to me. I love the strategic decisions and the tense interactions between competitors. I get tingles just thinking about this game. I firmly state that Food Chain Magnate is the best game I have ever played. While I recognize that it really isn’t for everyone, it would be a disservice to call Food Chain Magnate anything other than a masterpiece in game design.
