I recently played three wildlife themed board games.
Spirit Island has a very high score on BGG, but I tried it and really didn’t like it even though I like the theme. Each player is a nature spirit and is trying to fend off spanish settlers, with each settler begetting more and more of them and destroying nature. You can use various powers according to your personal deck of cards to do so, but also are able to add other powers to it to improve your chances.
I had a really bad time with that game. Perhaps we weren’t well coordinated or overlooked something in the rules, but the game was just so overwhelming in how many fires it starts up you are supposed to put out. It felt like playing three games of Pandemic at the same time.
A couple of weeks ago I played Living Forest, which received the “Kennerspiel des Jahres” for 2022. In this game each player is a forest sprite trying to keep a forest alive while competing to complete one of several goals. The first to complete one of those goals is the winner.
It has elements of deckbuilding where each player starts with the same deck of animals that help you in those tasks, and you can add new ones by buying them from a common storefront that only is filled up at the end of each round. Each animal purchased also adds a flame to the center of the table, and if you don’t have enough water to combat them, negative cards will be added to your deck.
Playing your cards also has a push your luck element as each animal provides you various resources to accomplish your tasks. However, some animals are “loners”. You can reveal any number of animals from the top of your deck, but you have to stop if you hit your third “loner” and forfeit one of your two actions for your turn as a result, so you want to stop before then. There are also tokens you can gain and spend to discard loners as you draw them (or remove the negative cards from your deck, as they only count as loners and don’t provide any resources).
The game was quite enjoyable but I found a bit too overburdened with different kinds of resources. There are no tokens for them as you only have them for the turn, which is good, but also makes the decision of what you want to do with your turn a bit complicated and sometimes you overlook what you have as certain animals add resources while other remove them. There is also a “tragedy of the commons” element with extinguishing the fires. Extinguishing twelve fire tokens is one win but I don’t think that can be accomplished. There is also a “shoot the moon” option as certain animals provide you with an icon that isn’t a resource, but if you reveal twelve icons across all your drawn animals you instantly win, but it feels like a trap if you don’t go for that from the very start of the game.
Yesterday I played the actual “Spiel des Jahres” 2022 in Cascadia. The game is kind of similar to Carcassonne in a way as a tile laying game with a relatively simple rules set. There is a randomized set of facedown tiles and a bag of animal tokens. You also start with a random corner of three tiles. Laid out are also always four tiles with a token next to it. Players take turns piking a row of a tile and a token to add to their area, with the empty slots being filled up immediately.
Each tile has up to two types of terrain, and at the end of the game you get points for each tile part of the largest connected group of terrains in your area per terrain type. The players with the largest such terrain groups among the players also get bonus points for that. Each tile also has one to three animal icons, meaning the type of animal token you can place there. At the start of the game for each of the five animal types a random card is chosen which denotes a formation of animal tokens you want to accomplish and how they are scored (e.g. you want pairs of bears and you want to have long chains of salmon). If a tile only has a single animal icon, when you place an animal token there you get a pine cone which you can spend to redraw all the animal tokens or buy a token from one row and a tile from another.
Basically you want to strategically incorporate various terrains and and fill them with animal tokens in the correct formations, making it a balancing act between those two things. The game was quite enjoyable, but at least in the first couple of rounds you are definitely acting very myopically as you don’t pay attention whatsoever what the other players are doing.