Wild: Serengeti (Kickstarter Edition)

Board Game Geek Reviews

1. 3 out of 10

   apatheticape

   Prototype played on TTS (version last updated May 25, 2021) using rulebook 1.1. One of my friends was considering backing the game and asked us to try it out with him. Lots of issues at 4 players; There was a traffic jam of animals on the middle to right side of the board by end of round 1 and it was nearly futile trying to maneuver animals into place for many of the scene cards which can potentially require several moves to achieve. With a very low amount of coins per round, and only two possible actions with those coins, we were left with very few maneuvers and up to 6 possible chances for other players to screw up your plan by the time your turn came back around. Just one action from another player could throw off your target for a scene and turn 2 actions needed on your end into 5 actions for example, making it a constantly moving target that could go on forever. And you're likely to miss completing it for end of the round even if you managed to have no one mess with your configuration afterwards with the tight coin/action economy. You can sometimes achieve certain scene cards purely out of luck of what's on the board (someone picked up a few cards and achieved them immediately at one point) and I was able to strategize slightly by getting scene cards that required similar animal configurations and trying to go for one of the other ones instead if one didn't work out. But most scene cards were often dead cards requiring too many steps and the hope that someone wouldn't move something in your configuration. The way scoring works is frustrating too, with luck of the draw a big part. While having an offer row that you can wipe helps, the reality is, the tight coin economy makes it incredibly difficult to wipe multiple times and spend the money to get what you need (and there are a lot of scene cards). With some scene cards (ones with plant symbols) only scoring when you collect and fulfill enough sets AND THEN collect other scene cards that you fulfill that give you bonuses for those specific types - it’s just a clash of too many requirements combined with too much randomness in the game. Getting food and SFX scene cards seems to be key for flexibility that escalates in power if you have accomplished one at the beginning but if you don’t start out with one of those goals, they become quickly super difficult to achieve as the board gets crammed up. Some scene cards can be so difficult to accomplish, it felt penalizing every time you went after one of those cards and other plans would ruin it. It was just a constant tug of war where you couldn’t quite get what you needed and the only cards that could be fulfilled were cheap ones, unless randomness dealt you a lucky placement from other players. In Round 2, we were all dying for a “migration” to happen already with the crazy jam on the board. By the end of round 2, we were just frustrated and wanted to end the game. We flipped the migration card for round 4 over only to see that it would only have removed a single animal from our board. The migration cards seem like they were put in the game to solve the animal jams that occur - but with 4 players, they come way too late, and they also just add more randomness to a game that really doesn’t need more. You could be working towards something and then have the migration cards completely wipe out half your plan and have that happen every round in the last couple rounds. Or you could get lucky and it clears things up for you. Or nothing gets removed and you're all stuck with a frustrating round of nothing. The point is, they feel like a patch for a game problem except the patch itself comes with its own problems. I mean, why wouldn't you at least make the migration cards known maybe from the beginning, or in the previous round, etc? At the very least, that would allow people to plan for it without feeling cheated by the randomness that migration creates. We also felt the movement actions were just too underpowered for you to have much control over what happens in the game. Perhaps 1-3 movement actions for a single animal should be 1-3 movement actions for any combination of animals you want. I feel like there may be a workable 2 player game in here maybe. At 4 players, this game just leaves you out to dry if you want to plan for anything at all. It punishes you for your plans, time and time again. ALL OF THAT SAID, we all agreed that the most frustrating thing is that the core of the game, moving these animals around, strategizing around that, getting them into the right habitats, etc to fulfill these cards - there’s something really satisfying and fantastic about that loop. I think the designer is really onto something at the core of this. It’s fun placing and moving the animals, the game is gorgeous, and somewhere buried in the mess, there’s an elegant and fantastic design with a cleaner rules set that I'm convinced could be an accessible family weight hit with some meat on it. THAT version of the game we would definitely all consider buying. One of us joked that we needed to wait for the 2nd edition of the game which unfortunately is unlikely with a KS game. But as it is, the randomness is too much and there’s tons of AP not in a good way each turn, it’s simply because any plans you had previously are wrecked by the time it gets back to you and now you have to try to mitigate or go after another card, and then that happens again the next turn, and the next…it felt like the game kept trying to strangle our gameplay. It felt like we were constantly playing against the game and not playing against each other. This game really needs to fundamentally go back to the playtesting stage and fix the interlocking mechanisms between the board/animal placements, turn actions and coins, and scene cards extensively before the game launches. Scene cards could use less randomness in point scoring methods and less onerous requirements perhaps. Or perhaps the game requires a slightly larger, less tight grid. Or more leeway in movement points. Or more leeway in the action/coin economy per round. There's a lot that needs to be reworked and re-tested altogether to do the core of this game justice. I really hope we see the great game underneath at some point but seeing that it’s launching soon, it feels like it’s likely going to end up as another KS disappointment unfortunately with a great core, but far too rushed development process.

2. 6 out of 10

   Abinrml

   Too much luck involved getting the right scenes from the available pool, which makes players constantly getting the renew scene action, which in turn makes rounds last longer even if none of the players suffer from Analysis Paralysis which this game is certainly prone to. All that coupled with really imbalanced rewards (hearts > paws > plants) and virtually no meaningful way to get more actions as none of the rewards provide more coins=actions makes me feel this game could have been SO much better with some more luck mitigation, fewer rounds, and less AP situations (eg renewing the scenes card pool virtually every turn) . Too bad the nice theme and components are not backed by a solid mechanics backbone.

3. 2 out of 10

   esfive

   W: upgrades & mini expansion Pros: beatific minis, coolish table presence Cons: put me and gf to sleep. The game is like a very bad and basic version of Everdell. It’s a tableau builder, but lacks excitement. You know how in everdell after every season you compound your tableau to gain resources? Well, in this game you have to get an incredibly, and unrealistically large amount of the “resources” printed on card captures to get a reward. What’s the reward? Always victory, sorry, DOCUMENTARY points. So in between turns you’re going to fall asleep and then wake up to the real nightmare: this horrible game. Oh and it’s 7 rounds, that’s about 4 too many for this basic butt euro.