Jeremy’s Gaming Gratons: WONDROUS CREATURES

Wondrous Creatures!!! Talk about a wonderful game from Bad Comet. It’s a fairly straightforward tableau builder. On your turn, you get one action selected from four different actions:

— Place workers to generate resources, or draw cards from the wilderness of the matching biome types that are adjacent to your placed crew member;

— play up to two cards from your hand paying their resource cost and activating their special card abilities;

— claim an achievement, which usually requires you to have a certain amount of creature type tags or other conditions; or

— recharge by recalling all your deployed workers, activating any recharge abilities you have, discarding down to five cards in hand, and advancing the time tracker.

The end of the game is triggered when all the achievement trophies are gone. That person finishes their turn, then everyone except the person who triggered it gets one finally turn. You’ll score points everywhere, from playing cards, raw points on creatures, gaining eggs and placing them into your reserve, from claiming achievements, and sometimes from recharging.

For me, Wondrous Creatures is the right type of hybrid card based game. Sure, there are public goals to aim for, but each turn is incredibly tactical. You have to choose to work with what you’ve got in front of you to get closer to winning.

Wondrous Creatures reminds me a bit of Ark Nova in that aspect as you’re playing cards for tags and special abilities, and racing to objective cards that also generate more VP. You can’t get too hung up on ‘needing that ONE card to do the thing’. Just go with the flow of what comes out, make the best of the situation and you might just win.

Tyler naturally spanked us with 192, the next closest was Jamie with 118. Tyler had an insanely great score for his first play. We also had The Jay Bell in town for our game night showing off some of his amazing prototypes, which always feel like they should already be on a store shelf, as well developed they are. I’m ready to have more games with Jay’s name on them, on my shelf.

Just a little something to chew on — Jeremy

Jeremy is an omni-gamer from Lafayette, Louisiana, who games at home with his wife and young son, but also can be frequently hosting or visiting game nights with friends all over Acadiana. Jeremy loves games about nature, IP games involving turtles and batmen, and games appropriate to play with his young son, but expect lots of different games discussed here each time.