Publisher: Wattsalpoag
Year: Expected 2018
Personal History:
The fine folks at Wattsalpoag Games offered to send me a demo copy of their current Kickstarter campaign game Echidna Shuffle, and I gratefully accepted. Longtime readers of the page know that I am a sucker for nice components, and what components I had seen in pictures for this game were pretty impressive and enough to interest me alone.
Also, and longtime readers may NOT know this, but I spent a summer in Australia when I was sixteen. I had a great time, got to travel much of the East Coast, and while I don't pretend to know anything more about the country than anybody else, I am in love with certain aspects of it. Lift, for one, which is a delicious lemon soda that nobody wants to import to the United States apparently.
Australian wildlife was one of my favorite elements of the trip because they are super unique, sometimes adorable, and often full of poison or sharp claws. I don't know how many times I was told that Koalas, for example, had the ability and temperament to rip my face off without the slightest hesitation if I ever encountered one in the wild. As an 80's kid who grew up watching "The Noozles" this sort of ran counter to my expectations. The point is Aussie animals are neat, and Echidnas are Aussie animals, and I was interested in trying it out for that reason as well.
The copy of Echidna Shuffle I was sent for this review is about half hand-made and is truly an unfinished sample. While the plastic pieces are final sculpts their colors will be changed for the production copies. The cardboard tokens will be thicker, and possibly no longer made of cardboard if specific stretch goals are met. As I always say in Kickstarter reviews, please understand that what you see mostly likely will change a bit before you get to own a copy.
Gameplay:
The Echidna pieces are placed on the leaf spaces of the board randomly, facing the direction of the arrows on that particular leaf. Each player chooses a color and collects the matching bug and stump pieces, pickup and number markers. The player places her own pickup marker on any space without an echidna or another player's pickup marker.
Players then place their neighbor's stumps on any space they'd like. The basic goal of the game is to send echidnas to your pickup marker, collect on of your bugs with that echidna, and then transport that bug to one of your stumps, at which point both bug and stump are removed from the board. Keeping this in mind, when a player places her neighbor's stumps she must consider where on the board it would be most difficult to travel to after leaving the pickup point.
The game is played in rounds, with each player having a certain number of movement points per round. This number is determined first by each player rolling a die, and placing her movement token on the Number Board. Once all players have used their movement point for that round the players slide their tokens to the lower half of the movement track. In this way, over the course of two round, each player will have had a total of nine movement points, preventing lucky streaks and keeping players' chances more or less even.
On her turn a player must use all of her movement points. Each point allows the player to move one echidna forward into the next empty space. A player may move any echidna she likes so long as it follows the arrows and moves into an empty space. Movement points may be used to move one echidna the total number of spaces, or many echidnas a number of spaces which total that the player's allotment. If a player wishes to move an echidna onto a space that is occupied, she must first use movement points to move the occupying echidna out of the way.
If the player moves an echidna onto her pickup marker she may take a bug of her color and place it on that echidna. The player must then use her movement points to gradually navigate her echidna across the board to one of her stumps. An echidna will deliver its bug to a matching stump immediately upon landing on that stump's board space, regardless of who moved it there. The bug and stump are removed from the board once they are united.
There are some variations to the rules above for various reasons (full compliment of six players, obnoxiously competitive players, etc), but the basic concepts remain the same throughout. Once a player has delivered all three of her bugs to her stumps the game ends and she is the winner.
So How Is It?:
Let's spend a couple of minutes gushing over how over the top wonderful the echidna figures are. Pictures do not do them any justice, but you can definitely get a sense of their cuteness. Real echidnas aren't ugly exactly, but they're not particularly cute either. These though are very cute, and look like they've climbed right out of a children's book somewhere. Even the cover art, which is bright and fun and I do like a lot, doesn't quite reflect the reality inside the box. I will say that my daughter was a little heartbroken when I told her that we were just borrowing the game and had to send it back, as she spent some time playing with the "kidnas" after our gaming.
Not only are they cute, but they're way bigger than I thought they'd be, and the material they're made of is pretty hefty and durable. They feel like a proper toy you might buy from Fisher Price or Playskool or something, and that's probably a good idea since I imagine they'll be spending more than a little time being use in non-gaming capacities by whatever children receive a copy in a year or so when it's finally released. The bugs and sumps too, while not quite as exciting, are well sculpted and seem to be made with quality in mind.
The game itself is fun and easy to learn. It's a little bit like one of my all-time favorite family games, "The A-Maze-Ing Labyrinth", in that you are trying to navigate a series of paths to obtain an object, and the route is at the mercy of other players' movements. The difference her of course is that it's also a delivery game, and it's the not the path that's moving but the conveyance.
I played this a few time with my three-and-a-half year old, and while she grasped the basic idea it was just a touch too much going on for her to play it without a lot of reminding and prodding from me. She enjoyed it though, and I have to think in another year or so when it finally hits the shelves as a finished copy she'll be about perfect. As it is right now though she loves the echidnas, loves the bugs that sit on them, and would happily play with the components alone for hours if I let her.
For gamer adults this is a little light, but like Labyrinth I think it's interesting enough to be worthy of some play. Honestly there are no luck elements in the game besides the movement dice roll, and even that has been evened out. Everything is planning and reading your opponents, and while it's light fair it's not brainless or too easy to be simply a kids game. I think the rules variations included were well thought out too. It's easy for a game like this to devolve into just ganging up on the leader and endlessly moving his target, essentially creating a stalemate. One of the game modes gives players on their final bug delivery extra movement tokens when another player moves their echidna, helping to reduce the possibility of an endless back-and-forthing. It's a great example of thinking through possible crippling problems, although in a game this nicely designed I wish they'd just toss in a punchcard full of "tokens", instead of their "use some pennies" suggestion.
Final Verdict:
Echidna Shuffle is a very good pick up and deliver game which has been specifically designed to enchant your children with diabolical cuteness. Fortunately it's also fun and thinky and easy enough to teach that the whole family will get a kick out of it in those ten or so minutes before the children steal the components from the box and lose them forever. Make sure you check out their Kickstarter campaign at the link below! As this is a near final copy I'm happy to give it a "Good" 4/5.
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