A Wild Venture

A Wild Venture is a two-player card game – that is, it comes with a (small) board, but the juice is most definitely in the cards, which give you various returns in the short term – and points later. The theme is a little opaque – a yearly competition, contributing to the village, winning the most votes… but what matters is who has the most points at the end of the game.

Your primary goal is to tuck cards, which means flipping them face-down. The cards come in three suits – Crow, Frog, Rabbit – and at the end of the game you’ll score your least-tucked suit multiplied by your most-tucked suit. Let’s say you finish with 8 crow, 5 frog and 4 rabbit cards: you ignore the frogs and score 8×4, giving you 32 points.

How do you go about tucking cards? Well, there are three kinds of cards as well, across all the suits: Buildings, Villagers and Gear. You begin the game with three buildings already in a row on the table (Nest, Lilypad, Warren) and can pay cash to add more buildings to the row. Or you can play Villagers or Gear into separate rows, each of which function in slightly different ways.

When either card is played they will have a number of Supplies added to them. You can activate the action on a Villager card by removing a supply from it, and when all supplies are removed that card will be tucked. Gear cards are not actioned, but triggered by a particular circumstance. When any player triggers anyone’s Gear, they get to take a supply from the card and turn it into cash (the game uses the same tokens for both). The benefit for the triggering player is the instant money; the benefit for the player whose Gear it is is that when the card is emptied of supplies, it gets tucked.

The actions themselves are largely facilitating this turnover of events (-get more cards, or more money to play them) or moving your piece on the board, which has several paths to travel along. The board largely syncs with the above: you take the benefit of wherever you piece stops on the path, and most of them simply give you money or more cards. Some, however, give special one-off powers, like tucking cards from your hand or flipping your starting buildings to their other side.

That’s mostly it – this rhythm of paying cash to play cards, and then emptying them of supplies to tuck them continues until the deck is emptied, and then there is a little end-game scoring where your largest haul of points will always be your tucked cards.