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The garden is full of geckos, scurrying around capturing bugs and seeking out new areas to hide.
Each player represents five geckos that must work together to capture as many bugs as possible along with achieving objectives to score victory points. Objectives come in two forms, creating chains between geckos to link certain bug types, or simultaneously occupying certain patterns of terrain. Players have an on-going hand of 3 terrain tiles plus are dealt a secret bonus at the beginning of the game (a certain bug or terrain type).
On their turn, players place a terrain tile (which contains a mix of 3 patterns) adjacent to a tile on the board with a matching terrain side and place a gecko over the matching pattern across the two tiles. If the placed tile fully surrounds a previously placed tile, the bug on the surrounded tile is awarded to the player with the most geckos touching it. Additionally, if the gecko placed results in a bug sequence in the objective market and/or a terrain sequence, the player is awarded the corresponding objective(s).
The game end triggers when a player achieves six objectives, or if the last tile available is drafted.
Each objective card has bug points on the bottom of it. The winner of the game is the player with the most bug points collected (objectives + awarded tiles + secret bonus) at the end of the game.
-description from designer
- just too random for me
- Putting out geckos and connecting things
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Hey everybody, I'm Tom Vasel. Welcome to look back, a series where I take a look at games that I reviewed last year, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, and 20 years ago this week and tell you what I think about them now, if I think about them at all.
- So, let's jump back 20 years ago. I reviewed a game called Astro Plane, which was an abstract strategy game that almost required you to completely understand astrophysics to play it. It was not very good at all. I gave it a two out of 10 and it is one of the first times where the designer wrote me a very strong rant and went online and pretty much attacked me for being too stupid to understand this game, but it was pretty bad.
- I'm noticing games from 10 years ago didn't look necessarily great.
- And then surprisingly to me the game Face to Face. This is a two-player version of The Game. And I don't I think The Game is at best okay. But The Game Face to Face, that two-player version of it, I thought worked really well.
- So, this is a game where uh that Stonemaier Games did where I was like, "What is this Red Rising?" I went and read the the first trilogy so I could better play this game, which didn't matter because the theme is barely there.
- This is sort of like a Blackjack but with algebraic equations.
- Um algebra in a game, but I'm just amused by it.