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A beautiful competitive card game for 2 to 5 players which I believe actually gets better with more players sitting around the table. The most striking feature of this game is the beautiful artwork throughout. The box, the cards and counters all catch the eye in an incredibly pleasing way. Plus, the storage has been well thought out making it very accessible and quick to set. The animal cards are the size of postcards also, needed for placing counters on, they are a lovely touch. We all felt it was a lovely game to look at.
The Rules.
I actually could not quite get my head around the rulebook and ventured online to find a play through video. That cleared everything up and all dropped in to place. The likelihood is it was me as the reader that had the issue here over it being a challenging book. Although you will likely need to keep referring back to the card icons here until you have had a few play throughs. Otherwise the mechanics are straight forward to work with. Follow the set up in the book. Each player takes a mage. Each player takes one animal for their summoning pool and then form the pool of available animals to draw upon (a pool of 5). Your goal is to revive the crystal animals after they have been struck down by dark magic. Revive 5 animals to end the game. Each animal has a score on it as well as the possibility of unique bonuses on each animal which you count up when the game has ended. High score wins. How do you get to this point? Play is simple, you can make one of two choices on your turn. Either draw an animal from the summoning pool to place in your own summoning area.
Or…
Roll the “magic dice” to draw magic stones. The amount of dice you can roll is six less the number of animals in your summoning pool. Once you roll, you have to match the magic stones on the dice to available stone slots on your animals in the summoning zone. Once you complete an animal’s stones, it moves to the revived area and you are one closer to the five needed. There is also a possible action to take when you revive an animal. However, and this part of the game for me is excellent. Should you not be able to use the magic stones from your roll, then all other players gather the stones for their animals instead. This means all players can potentially engage with every player turn, certainly they will be most interested in their opponent’s dice rolls. That is essentially it. There is the opportunity to include spell cards which also bring some unique activity to the game. The mage’s also have unique abilities. These do potentially create some unbalance in the game, my advice is keeping all these features random for less complacency.
The gamble.
This game is about chance and pushing your luck. It is unavoidable with the dice and how you go about victory. You look at your options, you play the odds of what is available to gather. You also need to consider amount of availability of stones for animals in your pool versus the amount of dice you would like to roll. There are different views you will take here when you get into it, depending your strategy.
Open Play.
I’m not usually a fan of this but it worked so well here. Normally you have a hand of cards and opponents do not know what you may be planning. In Animals Gathering play is open and you can see everything your opponent is up to, and they see what you are trying to achieve. It’s clever. It can easily influence your strategy as well. With opponents having the opportunity to gain from your dice rolls, it may very will influence the dice you select to roll, if at all. As you may summon another creature and hope to gain some stones from other player rolls. I really loved this.
A social game.
This game is competitive but far from intense in play. It’s relaxing and not something you need to stay too heavily engaged with. Albeit, I’ll caveat that until someone picks up the dice ready to roll. Then everyone leans in to see what comes up and I’ve not seen a game capture the intrigue like that before. It was very clever. Animals gathering also takes about 30 minutes to play with a definite end point at the completion of the fifth creature. I can see this being a fun family game to try when my children are a little older. It is recommended for 8 and up but a competent child a year or two under this will cope with the mechanics I believe.
Final Thoughts
I’m new to this game and just writing this blog makes me want to get it out straight away and have another go. It really was a delight to play making a lasting and positive first impression on me and I highly recommend to all.
