Weretigers - A new benchmark in lightweight coops? TCbH Review
Transcript
Over the years, I've covered werewolves, werebears, gamma hulks, and all sorts of other various Tabletopian metamorphosis and/or lyanthropy. But when I was contacted by Sordane Publishing to cover their upcoming Kickstarter, Wear Tigers, I was like, Where Tigers? And I was intrigued. Then when I dug a little bit deeper and saw that it was a cooperative dice-based lane defense game inspired by Burmese folklore, I was like, "Ah, where tigers?" And that's when they had my attention. The village is under attack, and it's up to you and your fellow players to defend it. Each turn, you roll a couple of dice, generally place them on an initially symmetric and rather basic set of villagers to take actions such as setting traps, building walls, revealing potential threats marching through the jungle, or even get new unique villagers with different or more flexibly diced actions. Then, as is so often in co-op games, bad stuff happens. At the end of each turn, a card is flipped and rumor tokens are placed in one of the three lanes at the farthest edges of the jungle, pushing any already in their spaces forward, possibly causing a chain reaction and movement, which is bad news bears or tigers, I guess. Anyway, it's bad because if rumors make it unrevealed to the village, they cause disarray and permanently take up a slot from the villager market. If revealed tokens turn
out to be anything other than the wind, most likely a horrific and awesome tiger beast and it makes it to the village every turn it'll chomp on villagers in the market and on top of the deck. If three rumors clog that market or the villager deck empties before the first and second levels of bad stuff cards run out, you lose. Survive until then and you win. Where Tigers is, at its heart a simple dicebased tower defense game, just without towers, where you're trying to make proactive decisions to mitigate the worst disasters while you build up and try to react to the rest, hoping to survive till the end and protect what's yours. And in that, it succeeds. You invest in traps that if tokens pass, you get to roll a dice. And if you get a five or six, then the token and trap disappear. Roll lower than that and it waits for the next potential victim.
Walls offer a one- turn reprieve from revealed tokens at your gate, which can be invaluable in that wear tigers immediately outside of your doorstep and in the village can have dice placed allocated onto them, dealing damage, freeing up said dice and netting experience upon their death. What's experience, you say? Well, I'm glad that you asked. Experience is a system that is the last thing that you can do with dice that we haven't yet covered where you can take a dice that you've rolled as one of your potential to use dice on your turn and place it onto your experience board in an empty slot matching the number of pips. Once you fill up all six, you permanently unlock another dice for your pool and can roll and place three, then eventually four dice per turn. But one of the trickier and more clever aspects of this game is that you have a limited pool of dice.
Place them in your experience board or assign non-fatal damage and they're locked up. Even actions that require two or more dice to activate can be primed with partial placement. Though you eventually will run out of dice and can only reclaim those on your villagers to your pool at the start of a round. It's this deliberate, simple structure with intertwined growth and pressure that gives Were Tigers its cool, poppy, fresh, but intriguing identity. Though, it's also very challenging and not without its limits. This game's greatest strength and gravest weakness is that it lives in two worlds. Its small box, easy tole learn, go-lucky dice rolling meshes mostly well with the mounting pressure and clockwork opposition typically associated with larger games. But for fans of those deeper experiences wanting more, you might find wear tigers lacking. Your turns, assign randomized dice. The next spawns, flip a randomized card. What that enemy is, random unrevealed token. What tools you have available, randomly drawn villagers in the market. A lot of the most popular games put a lot of work in mitigating peaks and valleys by semi- randomizing during setup, being more prescriptive in systems or offering rerolls, currency, or other ways to grab the reins of fate.
But that's not this game. Where Tigers strives for ease of access and low play times. Heck, even my learning game took under 30 minutes. But I love co-ops and I love tower defense and I love what this game is putting on the table. But I couldn't help but feel that it offers the strategic framework that I'm looking for and some options to do on my turn, but rarely a way to look back and reflect on what I should have done differently. If I have any other criticisms to lay on it, though perhaps there's also a bit of a silver lining is that there's room for growth. You can easily see how there's room for asymmetric powers, maybe some new scenarios, some new types of traps, new villagers, heck, even adding some towers. As of right now, the game is pretty basic. There is a decent amount of content in this small box, but you'll be seeing mostly the same content, just in different orders, and the viability of major strategies will remain consistent pretty much every single game. But for all that, where Tigers sits proudly a cut above in terms of difficulty, framework, and strategy when measured against a lot of cooperative contemporaries in its class in terms of shelf space, playtime, and ease of play.
And that's our review. But let me know, what do you think about this game? What's your favorite form of lyanthropy? And what is your favorite go-to smaller, easier to approach cooperative game? Put it in the comments. And as always, thanks for watching, thanks for supporting, thanks for being such a great community. You know that I've been Jack for the Cardboard Herald.