presentation

Animals on Board

Pairs prohibited, herds Welcome!

You want to have many animals for your ark, but there was a certain Noah who acquired a monopoly on pairs. So, you need to avoid having pairs at the end of the game, and have single animals and herds of three or more identical animals instead.

The game features twelve kinds of animals with five tiles each, values 1 to 5; For two, three or four players, eight, ten or twelve kinds are shuffled and stacked face down. Each player has a food crate and, at the start, draws three animals from any stacks, selects one and then all players simultaneously place their two left-over tiles openly in the middle.

For each round, this display is replenished to show eight, ten or twelve open tiles and one face-down tile. In your turn, you have one action: You either split a group of animals - that is a number of animals next to each other and with some distance to other groups, the display at the start is one such group - any way you want and take a food crate from stock. Or you discard as many crates as there are animals in a group and take this group for your ark and pass for the round. If someone has ten or more animal tiles, the game ends at the end of the round. You then remove all pairs from your ark and score the value of each single animal and five points for each animal in a herd, plus one point for left-over crates.

Animals on Board is a surprisingly tactical, very attractive family game which plays surprisingly fast! The mechanism of “I split, you choose” demands some tactical considerations; I want to keep “my” animals together, but offer minimum options for herds to other players. Did he take monkeys last round?

Players: 2-4

Age: 8+

Time: 30+

Designer: Ralf zur Linde, Wolfgang Sentker

Artist: Alexander Jung, Andreas Resch

Price: ca. 20 Euro

Publisher: Pegasus Spiele 2016

Web: www.pegasus.de

Genre: Set collecting

Users: For families

Version: multi

Rules: de en + cn dk es fi fr hu kr nl no pl pt ro se

In-game text: no

Comments:

Pretty components

Simple rules

Interesting memo component

Group splitting needs consideration

Compares to:

Set collecting games with a memo component

Other editions:

999 Games (nl), g3 (pl), Korea Boardgames (kr), Lautapelit (dk, fi, no, se), Ludicus (ro), Matagot (fr), Piatnik (hu), Stronghold Games (en), Swan Panasia (cn),

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 1

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 3

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0