The Wolves
Designed by: Ashwin Kamath,Clarence Simpson
The Wolves sees you controlling your own pack of wolves, seeking to dominate the landscape and triumph as the wolfiest wolves. How? By growing your pack, building lairs and dens, hunting, and dominating lesser animals and forcing them to join your pack.
The board is modular and will vary in size depending on the number of players. What doesn’t change is your own player board, which tracks your packs abilities – in terms of how many can move and how far, and how effective your alpha wolf is at howling, which is a necessary skill to recruit both lone wolves – which appear on the board – and those in other packs.
Each turn you get a default of two actions, of the type mentioned above – moving, hunting, et cetera – but the game has an interesting way of confining your choices. Everyone has a set of Terrain tiles that show different terrain: to take an action that involves that terrain, either as a destination or a okay where you’re building or dominating another wolf, you must flip over matching terrain tiles: just one for movement, but two for building dens/lairs and three to dominate a wolf into your pack. Because each terrain tile has non-matching sides, this creates an ongoing puzzle: what terrain is available to you to manipulate, and by how much? The game rewards your building of dens with bonus actions and one-use terrain tiles, which can be extremely powerful. And all this growing and building and dominating is pushing you in certain directions, not least of which is controlling territory.
At certain junctures of the game – timed by a Moonlight track – scoring is triggered on the various modular territories of the board, and – as well as getting wolves, dens and lairs off your player board and onto the main play area – this is a key avenue to scoring points, for the players with the most wolves, dens and lairs (specifically lairs!) present. When the last of these territories are scored, it’s the end of the game. Players count up the points shown on their board and the points gained for territories, and the player with the most points wins.
Sam says
The Wolves is slightly flawed in one respect, in that the early player seems to have an advantage that gets bigger the farther you go around the table – going fifth in a five player fame would be brutal, as being first to certain things – hunting especially – can be so critical. Some kind of balancing house-rule (terrain and/or action tokens for the players later in turn order?) – is needed. Do that and it’s an interesting mix of race, puzzle and literal domination: of both wolves you want to turn to your cause, and the precious territory. Personally I find the shared focus on the wolves territory more interesting than the need to clear your player mat for points, but the two do intertwine and there are positives as well: the game looks good, it’s pretty easy to teach – there’s just five actions, with hunting a circumstantial benefit you can reap just by positioning your wolves – and it offers a significant degree of interaction without the fisticuffs becoming the dominant experience. I don’t find myself hugely anticipating more plays of The Wolves, but it’s an intriguing game, and definitely one for the tacticians rather than the forward-planing strategists.
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Take That!
Present without being as dominant as you might expect. Players can dominate each other, but because actions are scarce and you'll have other focuses too, it's just one of a number of things vying for attention.
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Fidget Factor!
Moderate to high, depending on player count and how comfortable those players feel about the tile-flipping action system. Certainly there will be pauses.
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Brain Burn!
Reading the shared board and its landscape is pretty straightforward. Affecting it can be trickier, especially late-game when the interaction hikes up and players vie for key spaces. Note that there are rules and geographical limitations to movement, howling and building we've not gone into here. But they're not onerous - the brain-burning is the puzzle over which action when.
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Again Again!
If you can balance the first-player advantage in some way, there's a lot or replayability built in to The Wolves, with variable set-ups and then player choices making the world dynamic and far from pre-scripted.
