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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Rio Grande Games | Mammoth Hunters

Mammoth Hunters

Price: £27.99

Out of Stock

(Board game, 3-5 players, ages 10+) Imagine a cold and windy autumn day about 30,000 years ago. For hours the hunters have shadowed the mammoth herd. Will they succeed? Will they be able to bring down one of the huge beasts? If they succeed, the beast will feed the tribe for many weeks… Players take the role of these fearless ice age hunters. They try to remain close to the mammoth herds as they wander from region to region. As all hunters want to be close to the mammoths, conflict is inevitable. ********** 3-5 players, 75-120 minutes designed by Alan Moon and Aaron Weissblum reviewed by Stuart Dagger Puerto Rico was always going to be a hard act to follow and the danger for the game that was given the job is that we would all spend too much time making comparisons and not enough on looking at its own intrinsic merits. So let us get that out of the way first. Mammoth Hunters is not in the same league as its predecessor, but it is still pretty good, a worthy member of the Alea ``big box\'\' series, one of the better games to emerge from this year\'s Nuremberg Fair and a damn sight better than the early verdicts from The Gathering might lead you to believe. The game is played in four rounds, in each of which you will get several turns. In the course of these, hunters and resources will be added to, removed from and moved around the various regions of the board, as players try to get their people into what will turn out to be the best areas. At the end of the round a ``population limit\'\' will be determined for each area and any surplusses culled. Surviving hunters then score points, with the most going to those in areas where the mammoths are located. At the start of the game a campfire marker is placed face-down in each region of the playing area. Its value will help determine the region\'s population limit but will not be revealed until the end of the round. After that some mammoths and hunters are placed on the board and each player is given 4 ``rocks\'\' (money) and dealt 5 cards. Three of these cards are ``dark\'\' and two ``light\'\', and it is this division into dark and light that is at the core of the game system. When it is your turn you will play a card. A light card enables you to improve the position to your advantage but will cost you money; a dark card means that one or more of your opponents gets to do something but the playing of it brings you money. Examples of dark cards include Each opponent may place 1 hunter (and you get 3 rocks). One opponent may remove 2 hunters, but no more than 1 from any player (and you get 4 rocks). With those cards that say ``one opponent\'\' you choose which it is to be, but you can\'t start adding conditions about how they are to execute the action. The opponent can, and quite probably will, direct it against you. The light cards enable you to add hunters or mammoths to areas and to move pieces around. For example, for 3 rocks you could either add 3 hunters in regions of a particular terrain type or 2 anywhere you like; for 2 rocks you could add a mammoth to a region where you had a strong presence; and for 1 rock you could move one of the campfire markers. As these examples show, rock for rock the light cards give more than the dark ones take away and so the general trend is for a board that gets more crowded as the round progresses. After you have played your card and the action has been executed, you have the option of discarding a card before making your hand back up to five. A neat little wrinkle this as it goes a long way to ensuring that you will always have useful cards to play and that your hand doesn\'t turn into a repository for ones that you don\'t want. The money you pay to play a light card is kept separate from that which is used to pay you when play a dark card and so there is a steady drift of cash from one pile to the other. The round ends when the ``payout pool\'\' runs out. The campfire markers are then turned face-up and there is a scoring. This is done region by region. Each region has a basic population limit of 3 and to this is added 1 for each mammoth that is there and the values of any campfire markers. These are in the range 0-2. This net limit is then compared with the number of hunters in the region and if the latter is greater than the former, some of the people have to go. This is handled by each player with a presence taking turns to remove a hunter. The one with fewest hunters removes first and the process continues until enough have gone. And if you think you have seen something like that before, it is because both the idea of a population limit and the method of removing people is identical to that employed in Francis Tresham\'s Civilization. It always was a clever idea and the wonder is not that it is being re-used here but that, as far as I recall, it hasn\'t been re-used before. It works perfectly in this sort of context. Each surviving hunter scores 1 point if in a region with no mammoths, 2 if in a region with one and 3 if in a region with more than one. When all regions have been scored, the player in last place has the option of advancing the glacier to take out one of the regions. Any pieces in the region that has been lost to the ice are removed from the board, and since the choice of region is up to the player, it is an option that will usually be taken. The bank is shifted back from the light side to the dark and the whole process starts again. Repeat three times and aggregate scores over the four rounds. The complaint coming out of The Gathering was that there wasn\'t enough interest in the game to justify the two and a half hours that it was taking and if that really was the correct playing time, I\'d agree with them. However, as Greg Aleknevicus pointed out in his account of The Gathering in the last issue, the fault lay with the players rather than with the game. These people are among the best games players around, but on this occasion they got off on the wrong foot and ``group think\'\' took over from there. What they were doing was starting by playing light cards. Having thus improved their positions, they were then nervous about using the heavyweight dark cards, with the result that everyone was running on subsistence economics and the outflow of money from the dark side of the bank was slow. Greg\'s claim was that the game would go much faster if people began by playing their dark cards. He is right and not only is it the quicker way to play, it is the superior strategy, as a little commonsense reflection should tell you. The play of a dark card often involves enemy action against a player or players of the executor\'s choice and what more natural choice of victim than the player whose onboard position is strongest? That being the case, it makes sense to delay sticking your head above the parapet. Starting a round with the play of your heavyweight dark cards and leaving your best light ones until later achieves several things: 1. It boosts your bank balance, giving you the funds to pile in with successive high value light cards as the round draws towards its conclusion. 2. It makes you a less likely victim of actions taken by other players. 3. It gives you more time to recover from any actions that are directed against you. 4. It gives your opponents less time to spoil the good positions you have created. That it also makes for a much quicker and more enjoyable game comes along almost as an afterthought. In our first game, worried by the tales of overlong playing times, we decided to follow the suggestion Greg made in his report and just play 3 rounds. Despite the fact that this was the ``learning game\'\' we finished in just over 60 minutes. In the second we played the full four and finished on the hour. Mammoth Hunters doesn\'t have the strategic range of Puerto Rico or Die Fürsten von Florenz. There are no equivalents of ``this time I\'ll concentrate on shipping or architects\'\'. ``Dark before light\'\' is the best way to go and so that is what you do. What you then have is an interesting game of tactics and timing. Initially everyone will play dark cards and this will see the bank shrink quickly from its initial value of twenty odd to about five or six. The money gathering then goes on hold, partly because players want to play some light cards and partly because of a rule which says that if you own 8 or more rocks you can\'t play a dark one. Then follows a juggling for position as players try to gain numerical superiority in the places where the mammoths are and to shift the beasts into more favourable positions. All this while you have one eye on the size of the bank. Then somebody will pounce with the dark card needed to empty it. I like this game. The play is enjoyable and in the dark/light card mechanism the designers have come up with a mechanic that is every bit as clever and original as the ``share the pie\'\' one that they gave us in San Marco a couple of years back. It is not my favourite from Nuremberg: Amun-Re retains that position, with Edel Stein & Reich second, but this is a close third and I\'m happy to recommend it.

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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Rio Grande Games | Mammoth Hunters

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