Expand your options for Earth by introducing animals that will interact with the flora and terrain.

Earth: Animal Kingdom is an expansion to Earth, a tableau-building game for 1 to 6 players, ages 14 and up, and takes about 45–90 minutes to play. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge of $39CAD (about $29USD) for a copy. You do need the Earth base game to play, and there are other pledge levels that include the base game, the first expansion, and deluxe components. It is also compatible with the previous expansion, Abundance, but does not require it—there are a couple of the animal cards that require Abundance but the majority do not.

Earth: Animal Kingdom was designed by Maxime Tardif and published by Inside Up Games, with art direction by Conor McGoey.

New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer.

Note: My review is based on a prototype copy, so it is subject to change and may not reflect final component quality.

Here’s what comes in the box:

The sprouts and canopies are just extras to supplement your current supply and aren’t a new component.

The animal cards are oversized cards, and each one is double-sided: one side has a global ability and one has a player ability. Each animal also comes with its own meeple (or meeples—some have more than one copy), and the meeple silhouette is shown on the card as well. The cards are marked with 1 to 3 stars indicating how complex they are to use, and there are also some that are marked that require the Abundance expansion.

There are so many different animal meeples and you’ll probably need to dig around to find the ones you need when you’re setting up! But they’re all custom shapes with silkscreen printing on them, and they look great—definitely more interesting than if they were just a generic shape and everyone just used the same thing. (In the advanced mode, everyone can have two animals, so I guess you’d need at least two different shapes to represent them.)

You can download a draft of the rulebook here. Since this is an expansion for Earth, I won’t explain how the base game works—you can refer to my original review here.

The goal of the game is the same as before: score the most points by the end of the game. Animal Kingdom provides some new opportunities for scoring.

Set up Earth as usual, including the Abundance expansion if you’re using that.

There will be one global animal ability, and then each player will have 1 or 2 animal abilities depending on what complexity level you’re playing.

Shuffle the animal deck and draw the top card as the global animal. It should be placed  with the “Global Ability” side face-up between the last player and the first player, because it will trigger at the end of each round.

Players then draft their personal animals: draw 4 cards, keep 1 and pass 3. Then of the 3 you’re passed, keep 1 and pass 2. Finally, take all 4 cards you now have, and keep 1 (or 2) to use for the game, and discard the rest. Place your animal(s), “Ability” side face-up near your board, and find the corresponding meeples and set them on the cards.

At the end of each round, when you go from the last player to the starting player, you activate the global animal ability.

Your own animal abilities activate whenever you use one of your leaf tokens. Typically, this happens when you place a leaf on the Fauna board because you’ve achieved one of the objectives. You may also discard a leaf from the game to activate your animal abilities—but note that you can’t get the leaf back, so that means you give up the opportunity to use the leaf to score points. Finally, if you’re playing with the Abundance expansion, if you discard a leaf to get a seed, you may also trigger animal abilities.

(If you’re playing the advanced game and you have two animals, each leaf lets you trigger both abilities, in whatever order you choose.)

The first time you trigger an animal ability, you’ll place its meeple onto your tableau—the card will indicate what type of card it will go on. Some animals move—if so, the initial placement counts as 1 movement. Some animals move up to a certain distance; some have to move exactly a certain number of spaces, and some will move directly to another space based on specific requirements. Movement is typically in any direction (including diagonally), but you cannot backtrack within the same turn.

The game ends the same as before: when somebody has filled their 4×4 grid of cards in their tableau, you conclude that round so everyone has had the same number of turns, and then calculate the score.

Some animals have end-game scoring, with a place on the card to place resources that will be worth points at the end of the game.

As I said in my original review, Earth is all about looking for synergies and building systems that will feed into each other. You’ll need to be able to get enough soil to pay for the cards you want, but maybe you find a terrain that makes certain cards cheaper to play. There are cards that will let you spend growth to grow sprouts, and vice versa. If you can ensure that you can take advantage of whatever action is chosen, then your ecosystem will thrive.

There’s always a lot of information to take into account. Not only do you have your own scoring objective (your ecosystem), but you’re also racing to accomplish the shared objectives on the Fauna board, because the sooner you do them the more points you’ll score. Each card is worth points by itself, and then there’s the matter of getting as many sprouts and growth segments placed as possible before the game ends, because those are points, too.

What Animal Kingdom adds is some extra abilities. Everyone gets the shared global ability, which might let you spend sprouts for other resources, or activate a specific type of ability, or even move sprouts or growth to your island card, where they’ll be worth more points at the end of the game. But you also get your own ability, so there’s another element of asymmetry on top of the three cards you choose during setup (island, climate, and ecosystem).

As you get more familiar with Earth, you realize that the initial setup, when you select those three cards, is really an important part of the strategy. The abilities you start with and the scoring conditions you select help set the direction that you’ll want to go, so you really want to look for an animal that helps you move in that direction. The card drafting seems a little strange at first, but it means that you get to see around seven different cards (a little fewer in a 2-player game) before you make your final decision on which animal to keep.

I liked the wide variety of animals and their abilities. Some of the simpler ones just let you  do things like move animals around and plant sprouts, or remove growth to draw cards. More complex animals have more restrictions—the Ring-Tailed Lemur can only move on mushrooms—but potentially bigger payoffs too, if you can set things up just right. That snow goose I chose in one game let you remove a single sprout from one card and then fill all the sprout spaces on another card, but only if they were both cold and really far apart.

For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Earth: Animal Kingdom Kickstarter page!

Disclosure: GeekDad received a prototype of this game for review purposes.

Source: geekdad.com