Wondrous Creatures

This game gets 9 stars alone for your human meeple being able to ride one of your beast meeples! Each turn is so satisfying and each card you play feels so powerful and sweeping.

Fun little game. Worker placement and card collection. Mainly an efficiency puzzle and a few explosive turns here and there. There is a lot of cards and ways to go about play. You can race for objectives and medals or you can set up the more efficient reserve of creatures.

The game went a bit long but we still enjoyed it and will continue to play it.

3/13/25: After 4 plays, raising rating. Truly an extraordinary title. While nothing is entirely unique, the smooth combination of mechanisms, excellent theme, and top quality production makes it astoundingly good and stand out among other games. Simply put - I reliably want to play this game and have found it pretty easy to teach. 1/30/25: Second play - love how differently it plays from game to game and enjoyed the gargantuan beasts expansion. 1/25/25: First impressions. Loved it. It takes the concept of Everdell but makes the decision-making feel more interesting and gives you a lot more control. I like the way you gain resources from the board, I like the leaders, and I like how achievements switch up the game.

Pretty good gameplay. Not sure about balance since there are a million unique cards. One negative was lots of iconography and symbol matching.

I really enjoyed playing this game. The biggest draw for me is the theme, artwork and the beautiful components. Without those, I'd give this game a 6 or 7. I'm a big fan of the fantastical creatures on the cards and their pun-tastical names. The meeples are very cute too.

Despite the great theme, I wouldn't call the game super thematic, but that's to be expected with a mechanics-heavy Euro. The game borrows mechanics from other popular games like Ark Nova, Everdell, Revive, Nucleum etc. It's a tableau-builder with elements of worker placement, resource management, set collection, engine building, and a bit of action chaining sprinkled in. The ruleset is not super complex, and while the listed playtime is entirely inaccurate, the game doesn't feel like a drag. The closest comparison for this game would be Everdell and I think this game is much better. The game does heavily depend on the cards, and there are cards that are strictly better than others, so you have to keep that in mind when you play. I'd be happy to play this game more.

(Plays: 1)

An interesting take on worker placement with a ton of Creature cards. Definitely enjoyed my play of it