Wildlife (German)

Big Scoring is triggered when a white area pawn is taken from the Small Scoring Track to reveal one of the three differently colored spaces (positions 4, 8, and 11).

The game ends when either the eleventh white area pawn is placed, or a player has placed his last organism tile. In either case, one final Big Scoring takes place at the end of the current player's turn. The player with the most success points wins. Food points that were not converted to success points during a player's turn are worthless. Remember that you may convert food to success during your turn only.

A player's turn consists of the following actions executed in any order:
- Play up to 3 Wildlife cards. At least one must be auctioned to the other players.
- Migrate once for free.
- Use owned ability cards.
- Convert food tokens to success points. Every three food points earn one success point.

After some fat snack lunch we went to the Clementoni stand to try out their game “Wildlife”. The stand was terrible, as just behind it they were demonstrating a PC game on a large screen and someone was commenting at the same time as you heard the sound from the game. It was difficult to go through the rules in the noise. We had picked Lutz, another German to game with us. First we wanted an overview of the game, although I had English rules, but every time we tried to get it, the girl from Clementoni started to read and translate directly from the rulebook, so we soon realised it was easier to go through them by ourselves.

The game is had a some interesting aspects, as that different players had different levels in different terrain. All creatures had two terrain types without any action, two with wandering, one with expansion and one with attacking. These are upgradeable with adaptation cards.  You do your turn by playing 3 cards and one of these cards must be auctioned to the other. Food is “money” in the auction.  If you bid too high, you may get food buy converting every victory points to 3 food. You may migrate (move) one of your tiles for free on the board, use your abilities (which you get through playing an ability card). The most important cards are the 6 different terrain cards (plus a few joker cards), which you use for wandering, expanding or attacking (only possible if the area is filled up with creatures) in the special terrain type. Every time someone fills up an area, there is either a small or a big scoring. When 11 of the 12 areas are filled up, then the game ends. After the initial rounds we got a better tempo and everyone found the game interesting.
Result: Carl=108, Peter=86, Lutz=85, Christina=103
Rating: Carl=8, Peter=8, Lutz=7, Christina=7