Animal Poker – Justin Bell
In 2022, HeidelBÄR released Animal Poker, based on the 1988 card game Career Poker, which itself is based on a game called [name too profane for a family tabletop review site] first described in a 1986 Spielbox article based on a traditional French game. That’s quite a history, so one assumes that when HeidelBÄR began pursuit of a retheme under its Radiant Culture Series sub-brand, this might be the stuff of legend. If my recent five-player game was any indication, that “legend” talk might be overblown.
Players take on the role of various members of Animal Inc., a fictional corporation where the goal is very simple: end the game by holding the title of CEO. 4-8 players take on randomly-assigned roles at the start of play, and over a series of rounds tied to a player-determined timer—the rules suggest anywhere from 20-60 minutes—players will play cards in a ladder climbing mechanic, with the player who sheds all their cards first taking the highest corporate position available. When the clock strikes midnight (in our case, 20 minutes), whoever is currently the CEO at the end of that round wins.
Animal Poker, like the other Radiant Culture Series games (such as Anansi, Spicy, and Tails on Fire), shines in one specific place: the art on the cards. The work here by Kel Alexander and Annika Brüning is beautiful and brings to life an otherwise straightforward game with pictures of smiling leopards, bored-looking fish working on spreadsheets, and turtles hard at work staring intently at computer screens. And like the cards used in Anansi, the shiny gloss finish adds a little something extra to the proceedings. The game is only OK, and glancing at other players during our short experience told me that this would be the only time the group would want to play it. In a world where there are literally thousands of different card games coming to market each year (including other “ladder climbing” games such as Tichu and my personal favorite of this category, SCOUT), Animal Poker struggles to stand out beyond its exceptional artwork.
Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ – The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?:
★★☆☆☆ – Would play again but would rather play something else
Read more articles from Justin Bell.
QE – K. David Ladage
As the housing markets were collapsing during the 2007-2009 global economic crisis, the Secretary of Treasury, Hank Paulson, went to Congress and asked for $700,000,000,000 to bail out the various banks and the like for what was called the Toxic Asset Relief Program (a.k.a., TARP). In QE (which stands for Qualitative Easing), each player is a major world power (i.e., China, the European Union, Japan, the United Kingdom, or the United States of America) which is trying to purchase the assets of some portion of the world’s economy to prevent the collapse of the global economic structure. As a nation with its own fiat currency, you can literally bid anything you want to bid for each element of the global economy. If the Japanese Housing Market is up for sale, you can bid any amount of money for that asset you like: one dollar, a thousand dollars, a million dollars, a billion dollars, a trillion dollars, a quadrillion dollars. You can bid any amount of money as long as it is not a negative number, and is a whole number. So yea, $8,675,309 is a legal bid, as is $3.14 googol. In the end, each asset is worth a number of points, as are various sets of assets (e.g., China would like to maintain control of all of the Chinese assets, for example), and monopolies (e.g., if you can control all of the agriculture, that would be a powerful place to be), and so on. But, and this is important, the player that spends the most money is eliminated for having collapsed their own economy. I have to say, I have a group of friends that lean toward the intellectual side of things, and while playing, we were all giggling like school children.
Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ – The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?:
★★☆☆☆ – Would play again but would rather play something else
Read more articles from K. David Ladage.
Zoo Vadis – Andy Matthews
Have you ever wanted to play a game in which animals took control of their own destiny? Then have I got a game for you! Famed designer Reiner Knizia released a game called Quo Vadis way back at the dawn of board gaming (also known as the ‘90s). It could charitably be called “dated”, but it was supposedly an excellent game that, like many of its brethren, went out of print. Fast forward to the early 2020s and up and coming publisher Bitewing Games partnered with Dr. Knizia to release an updated and reimagined version of the game, cleverly called Zoo Vadis.
Zoo Vadis, which we previously reviewed, remains faithful to the original, while offering a number of improvements: better artwork and components, tweaks to modernize the gameplay, and a general feeling of polish. In Zoo Vadis, animals vie for supremacy by asking for, and potentially receiving votes in which they may advance to the most important enclosure at the front of the zoo. Negotiations are the word of the day and almost anything is up for grabs including points, abilities, and the newly added special abilities (one for each species).
If you love using your wit and deviousness to outwit your opponents through political machinations, then Zoo Vadis might be an excellent game for you. Plus it plays up to 7 and has marmosets!
Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ – The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ – Will definitely play it again
Read more articles from Andy Matthews.
Bosa – K. David Ladage
I saw the review of Bosa on this site not too long ago. My colleague, Bob Pazehoski, gave this a 4-star rating and described the sort of puzzle-game that my wife and I enjoy playing. His description pulled me in. I ordered this game within a few minutes of reading his review. Since I was seeing this review before it went to the site, my copy actually arrived at my doorstep a day before his review was published… and I have to say, I think I like this game considerably more than Mr. Pazehoski does! This is a delightful puzzle that gets the gray matter working without being taxing. It has several wonderful decision points that become constraining near the end without completely locking the player into a course of action. This game is a keeper.
Ease of entry?:
★★★★★ – No sweat
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ – Will definitely play it again
Read more articles from K. David Ladage.
Chicken! with Chicken! Eggspansion – Bob Pazehoski, Jr.
Goodness, what a silly little thing Chicken! is. Of course, it is the best sort of silly—roll dice, put the chickens on one side and the foxes on the other. The beauty is in the eggs, each of which adds more dice to the mix. The fun is in then deciding whether to roll again, hoping for more chickens and praying against those pesky predators. Or maybe the fun is in banking chickens before sending a load of dice to the next player with a challenge: roll or chicken out. The character of Chicken! is in full effect when someone is rolling the whole lot with a table of raucous fowl chants.
We also tried the Eggspansion, which adds two dice to the coop. Before a reroll, the Chick is an egg, bringing in a new die. Counting chickens, though, it joins the flock. Blue, the farmer’s dog, might just bark away one of the foxes. The best part of the expanded game, however, is just the fact that someone might be holding two more dice in a moment of overloaded dice-chucking joy. Chicken! is a delightful quarter of an hour in a cardboard tube.
Ease of entry?:
★★★★★ – No sweat
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ – Will definitely play it again
Read more articles from Bob Pazehoski, Jr.
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