Action Selection Made Fun - Wildscape Board Game Review
Transcript
Hello, everyone. This is Sunova.
And this is Johannes.
And you are watching Board Gaming Ramblings.
And today we are taking a look at Wildscape. This is an upcoming Spiel release from Karma Games. This is a review copy that we got, and it is a pre-production copy, just so you know that before we go into everything. In Wildscape, you are in an area of kind of like a alternative world where there's no more nature. There is this mountain in the middle, but the nature around it is all gone, and we have to kind of re-nature that area by putting tiles. That's not like the theme is that you put tiles, but you There's new areas growing up, and you're re-introducing herbivores, snakes, primates, predators, fauna into that area of land to be the best that ever was. That's pretty good theme-wise from me.
I'm not the best at theme, but that is the theme. This game revolves around this little circular board here, which is a action selection game with a little shared Mancala mechanism. So, on my turn, I will choose an area around here, for example, this one. I can then get to take this tile and place it in my area, or I can play one of the primate cards I have into my hand, and then I can do the actions that are on this area, depending on the actions and the energy that is available. I can also use some of my energy, but that's going to go out of the game, so it's one-time use. The energy I use from here going to the middle, and at the end of my turn, I will distribute these energy tokens, which then changes out the energy values of the different action spaces. You will continue doing this until you will trigger a bird scoring or a bird watching scoring or phase, where you will have some majorities between the different players, and you will get some energy for that, or at the end of the game, some scoring. And then at the end of the game, after two of these bird watching phases, and then you trigger the end of the game, you will score points for a few things. The fauna cards you have in your hand, the primates and the predators you played onto your board. You will score for the different herbivores and the snakes that you placed out and a few other things that you will score for, but those are the main things that you get points for in this game. And that is a kind of brief overview of what you do in Wildscapes.
There is a lot more rules that we could cover, but this is not a rules video. I just want to highlight this neat player aid because a lot of the rules of the structure of how you're playing the game and also need like things to think about and also the scorings are here. There's a lot of symbols in general and there is like very good explanations for all the symbols in the rules, but this player aid is really neat and handy.
I 100% agree. The iconography is a a big part of this game. It is made to be a language independent. So it is always and a a positive and a negative thing in games because it will then be the first time you play, you will have to check quite a few times in the rulebook. And I have to say that it does often tends to end up that you check some of the cards anyways even after you play a few times because you want to be 100% sure. But after a few plays, I'm pretty like
confident
confident. That's what I was looking for. In looking at a card most of the time and being like I understand what this symbol means, I understand what this symbol means. So together this is what mean that. But as you said, it does a great job of every single card is explained with text in the rulebook. So you have that until you can just read the symbols as the text.
Absolutely. Let's talk about the main attraction.
Yes.
This um rondel board. It is a shared rondel.
It isn't really a rondel because the action markers are a rondel or a Mancala or more also it's not really a rondel at all.
But but yeah, when you're choosing your actions, you can go anywhere. So yeah, I agree. It's more of an action selection than the rondel. I think the Mancala system works perfectly. I think it's a great use for for that mechanism. We've seen it like in few games, but just like a personal little Mancala thing in Trajan and Ostia are the ones that comes to mind for me. And I think like in the beginning we thought like, "Oh, would you always just go for the ones that have a lot of these tokens to do actions?" But there's a lot of things that you want to do. There's so many reasons for why you want to go somewhere.
That is like the the reason it works.
Yeah.
And that is the reason I would say that is the reason that makes this game good. Because if it was like you would always go to the one with the most energy, it would be very uninteresting. Very often, like we had games where like there's a pile of like five. And you're like that is a lot of energy. But I really want this tile.
Mhm.
Or I really need to do this action right now because of my strategic reason. So, all of those together make it very, very good. I read like the designer diary and they had tried many different ways, but I think like it's been a very hard thing to make it work.
Yeah.
Because often you want to do more stuff.
Yes.
And of course it helps very much with that you have these energy. So, it is viable. Let's say there is like one over here. I really want to go there. It is still viable to go there because maybe I have used another action to get more of these or have some of the bird scoring. So, I will use them to power up that action. And also I don't change up too much of the economy after that, which is really, really nice. There are a lot of different actions you can do and I feels so far any times we play that there is a lot of different strategies you can go for. Last game we played now, one of the players went for like a very heavy predator strategy, which for me, for a little I'm not really good at the game, felt very hard. But like the more stuff you do, and easier it is to find like predator cards that works because all the predator cards have like a condition that you have to have set before you can play the predator card and you will get like a bonus in addition to the scoring at the end of the game.
The predators are nice because you don't need to play like it as an action play it. You can do that for free on your return. The primates, I struggle to find a good strategy with them because you need to for fee taking a tile versus playing a primate card and they're great because not only do they give you bonuses just like placing them. You don't need like a pre-requisition to do to place them and also they can score quite a amount of points at the end of the game, but those tiles are so nice. That's how you're making your your areas bigger and how you get to place more herbivores into on your player board.
I feel like very often there are there might be like one thing I have to do, but often there are many good things and there's like a plethora of choices which I think is great.
And like these bird cards also gives you like an additional thing you want to do. Not only is it good to get those extra energy or points, but you also want to deny your opponent from getting them.
Absolutely and talking about the bird cards, there is quite a lot of interaction in the game. There is like the interaction of course of hopefully don't nobody takes the things I want to.
Yes.
And then there is the interaction in these which is one of the main interactions of it and the tiles of course sometimes there is like a perfect tile for you and you really want that. So that's like more of a blocking thing. There's also a race to getting these specialist cards because you need an X amount of animals in the correct color to be able to draw the specialist cards and it's going to be higher the more people have taken it. So there is quite a lot of it's not mean interaction, but it is absolutely a good deal of very nice interaction. And I personally feel like these are better with more players.
I agree. I think we played with both two and three players. And I think the two-player games we've had were great. But I think that the bird scoring is especially because when you're two, you just like have four between you and you're they're all up for grabs. When you play with more players, there are two between the different players. So you're racing for some of them with one opponent and some with another one. And I think that was better with more players.
100%.
And also getting like the the state of the board or was more interesting with more players, too. But I absolutely did not mind this game with two. I don't I think it was great.
It was. I think the most interesting addition, as you said, is those because it's kind of like I don't want to only focus on the two between me and you, for example, because I'm basically giving that player four energy. So always trying to balance those out, which I really like. The game can be quite long. We have played two and three players. The box says 30 minutes per player. I think you'll have to play it a lot or play with people who don't think as much as we do on their turns. Um two-player game it was longer the first time, but it went down to like 90 minutes, which is the amount of time you should take with three players, according to the box. And the three-player game and with one new player took about 2 hours and 45 minutes, and which might be long for some people. And if you I don't think you can, in a good way, get it down to 90 minutes with three players. I think that then you would have to play it with the same people again and again and again and again and always be like always just do the thing that you you think about because there's so many options. I personally don't see who will play it in that amount of time.
But I we talked about this with the person we played with the third player game the last time and you could absolutely just like do something and and squirrel yeah I would say that
You could also just roll a die and do the action at the time you want.
is not a very tight game. You could just like I'm going here and getting cards and doing stuff. I'm not paying a lot to do the things that I'm doing.
But will that make the game fun?
I don't know. Um but
Like if you don't think about your choices and not try to score points.
Like if you have a high AP group this will take longer. If you're not I I can see absolutely you can get this game down to shorter than we've played.
But you can get any game like if you don't care about what you're doing you can just oh it's my turn I'm just going to go there and take the tile and I'm not going to do anything else. I don't see that as a viable way of playing the game. Of course some people will play it in a shorter time. But for me the fun of the game is to think about the options and try to be good. Like I'm not playing the game to just do things and not try to score points. But to that end I don't mind the game like the last time when we played a three-hour game sometimes it was a bit long between my turns but other than that like I'm engaged in the game for most of the period of that time anyways.
Yes I agree. In some ways this game feels very much like a classic Euro game both in the way that it looks but also that it's a lot of like cheats to [snorts] place and your personal board can look quite messy. You will have more animals sometimes in the same habitat. You will have to because because how many animals are there depends on how big the habitat is. You can add more of more tiles so you can you can have more space for more more tiles and more animals and but there's a lot of things going on here. Like I don't mind that at all.
Oh, no.
I think I had control over like it wasn't too messy for me, but I think maybe some people will will mind it. I think what really saves this game are those adorable little
things.
is those adorable little dice. They're not for rolling, they are for placing in an area to see how many like power or how much space you have left, basically.
here like this is an area of seven right now because this is double. I have spent five This doesn't spend any prime, it doesn't spend any space. I spent five on these, which means I have two left, which is then nice to know because then I don't have to count that every time, which is very, very helpful. With that said, should we do some final thoughts?
Yeah.
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There's a lot to like in this game. I really like this mechanisms that we talked about. There's a lot of crunchy choices on your return. I'm thinking, okay, should I go here? There's absolutely the most I can do here. I would like to get some of these predator cards that I can get from this action, but I really want this tile over here. And like timing-wise, and this is this a scoring coming up.
Yeah.
There's something else that's more important for me. So, I'm In this game, I'm I'm absolutely thinking like a couple of turns ahead to see if and and you have to be able to pivot as well because sometimes a player will take the action that you wanted, and there's suddenly no power that at all, and then you might want to do something else suddenly. There's so many like cool choices and so many like strategies to go for. You have to like this this puzzle right here, though. Being like that that's what you're trying to achieve, the spatial puzzle. I have to be honest to say that I've played multiple animal games that revolves of the round kind of this thing. Like you have to have an area this big. Like for example, I'm just saying Ark Nova, you have to have an area this big to place the this this size animal here. I would say, I think this is a game that I can remember that I think does that in the way that I like the most. So I think they will they make this this piece of the game very well. And that because that's usually not my favorite mechanism in animal games.
Just to have that out there. I can't really fault this game at a lot. I think it's just like really good stuff. It's a little long. That's my basically my only complaint. So I'm going to land this on an 8.5. I think it's an absolutely stellar game.
I like Wildscreen a lot. I think it's a really a lot of fun. I said like this is my favorite part of it, but I agree with you all this puzzle also is very good. And the puzzle kind of interlinks with this. We didn't go in deeply into how you get the animals, but basically those are free actions. You can just take them whenever you want. So sometimes you want to have as long as you have space of course. You can kind of you want to have multiples. You're trying to make a big area to put smaller animals, but some strategies you want to have like the big animal for different reasons. They're worth points depending on the size as well. And there is a lot to think about. I I played it three times. I played it very consistently bad all of those three times. I played it like the same the same like level of badness basically. I am not getting this game. I'm not understanding how to play well, but I am enjoying most of that except for when I feel like I'm doing nothing. And that's a me problem not a game problem.
But this is one I really want to play again because I want to understand how I got points and how I win the game because so far I haven't tried that. I'm going to land on 8.5 as well. I really enjoy most of the elements of it. Uh it is a bit long, but I guess it's if you play it a lot, you can get that down. Other than that, really great stuff. If you enjoyed the video, I already said that you can subscribe, so I don't know why I'm saying it again, but you can comment if you're interested in a game and if you're not, there's other games you can get as well. That is the end of the video. Thank you so much for watching. I'm Johannes. And you've been watching Board Gaming Ramblings and bye-bye.