Board Game: The Wolves

Awooo.

The Game: The Wolves
The Publisher: Pandasaurus Games
Time: ~60 minutes
Players: Me, Michelle, Gus, Megan

Game Play: The Wolves is a pack-building/worker placement sort of game. Everyone gets a wolf pack (Desert Wolf, Forest Wolf, Tundra Wolf, etc.). The differences are largely cosmetic, except that everyone has a slate of terrain tiles that act as currency during the game. When you take actions, you flip the terrain tiles, which changes the terrain, except that each wolf pack has a type of terrain with a double-sided tile so it's always available. 

Forest Woof

Actions include moving your wolves, building dens, upgrading dens to lair, howling and recruiting lone wolves, and dominating wolves and dens from other packs. All of these require you to flip tiles based on your target, so if you want to howl at a lone wolf on a tundra tile, you need to flip two tundra tiles.

In a dance as old as time

When you build dens or dominate wolves, you remove meeples from your board, which uncovers new capabilities (move further, howl louder) or grants you bonus tokens for extra actions or free terrain moves. Getting those tiles is actually the only way to be able to use three of a given tile in a turn (except the one specific to your pack, so for example as the Forest Wolf pack I have three forest tiles in my array but only two of everything else), and you need three to dominate a wolf or den. 

Choices, choices

Every time you remove a piece from the board (replace a lone wolf token with one of your wolves, steal a den, upgrade a den, etc.) the piece taken from the board goes on the moon chart. At certain points on the chart, you score a region based on which moon phases token is there. At the end of the game, you score back one what you've uncovered on your board.

Fierce competition

Opinions: I've been wanting to try this game for a while. I like worker placement games and this one has woofs, which is fun. I was, however, as always, a little worried it would fall flat in the execution, but it's really a lot of fun. 

As with many such games, the first time playing is a little fumbly because you don't know what effect certain choices will have. I think that here, you kinda need to get out to all of the region tiles quickly and establish a presence, since scoring is dependent on how many figures you have in a given region. Being able to dominate is also important, and avoiding getting dominated comes back to paying attention to who's around you and what tiles they have access to (if you stick to your own terrain it's less likely, but that's always not generally practical for very long). 

The production values are also good - the art is beautiful, the meeples and cardboard components are sturdy, and although everything is fiddly it's easy to tell where everything goes. Generally I think it's really well done, and there are multiple viable strategies to rack up victory points, which is always a good sign.

MICHELLE IS THE DOMINANT WOOF

 Keep? Yep