Designer: GW Yeom
Publisher: Bad Comet Games
Artist: Sophia Kang
1-4 players  |  60-90 min. |  ages 14+  |  MSRP $72 | BGG Entry
Time ot teach & learn: 10-12 min

Game Synopsis

It started with rumors.  An island beyond all maps, teeming with animals and plants beyond our imagination. Suddenly the race was on! A small group of Natural scientists set sail to explore and catalog  all the wondrous creatures of this mysterious land. Each turn your crews will compete to collect and study the flora and fauna of the island, from the highest mountains to the swampiest bogs. Manage resources and your research vessels to attract creatures to your preserve. earn trophies and achievements. Collect and hatch eggs for further study. In the end you may have to rely on your captains unique abilities to lead your voyage to fame and history. 

In game terms, wondrous creatures combines worker placement and tableau building mechanics to serve a peaceful and scientific goal: increasing our collective knowledge. Workers allow players to collect resources and creature cards. Resources allow creatures to enter a players tableau. Once there, creatures offer new abilities and benefits to your expedition. There are many paths and challenges to create a winning score. 

Why We Love Wondrous Creatures

Much of the beauty and the challenge in this game come from exploring the concept of natural balance. 

Ships allow you to gather food and attract wondrous creature cards. The type of food and creature is tied to the terrain where your ship is played. The food you collect will allow you to place the wondrous creature cards into your preserve for further study. Your preserve is a tableau of cards you will build throughout the course of the game. Once in your preserve, creatures enhance your exploration in a variety of ways - providing special abilities that may be instant continuous powered by mystical energy or triggered by the recharge action. Other creatures open new scoring possibilities at the end of the game.

There is a beautiful tension created between these two seemingly simple actions: place a ship on the island, place one or two creatures in your habitat. And this tension is complicated by several fun factors. Each naturalist in the game only has three ships, so there will come a time when you have no more ships to deploy. The recharge action allows you to collect all of your ships from the island so they may be deployed again on later turns. Deciding when to recharge will have an impact beyond your own expedition, though. Other explorers now have access to new parts of the island, allowing them to swoop in and gather food and creatures

Being pushed and pulled between the needs of these actions is challenging and entertaining on its own. 

But there is purpose behind this entire process.

Naturalism societies back home have set goals for your expeditions to achieve. They want your collection of wondrous creatures to take shape in very specific ways. One society may ask for a collection, including a specific number of insects and birds. Another may focus solely on dragons. Each of these goals will provide players with trophies, enhancing their reputation and score and the earlier you can accomplish each of these tasks, the more you score.

Can you find a way to balance exploring the island with three ships while collecting and studying the creatures in your preserve? All with an eye toward goals set by the naturalist community back home…

A rich complexity rises from this challenge - one that echoes the intricate 
Wonder and Beauty of the natural world itself.

All these mental gymnastics are lovely, important, and fun.

BUT

It’s the game’s sense of magic and whimsy that brings Wondrous Creatures closest to our heart. Instead of stodgy Darwin and the HMS Beagle, we have a competition between magical naturalists on a mythic voyage to a fantastic island filled with odd Pokémon like critters, each with a bevy of strange abilities that can mesh in unexpected ways. You can unlock crazy captain abilities over the course of the game. You can gather eggs to spend or hatch and even rehatch them to aid your progress. The art on the creature cards and the incredibly cute animal shaped ships and their captains are so engaging. From the moment your ships land on this crazy island on turn one, Wondrous Creatures takes you by the hand and says, “Come on! Let’s see what’s just over that next hill… and then the next.“  

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Congratulations to designer GW Yeom

More information on Wondrous Creatures at: Bad Comet Games

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