Published by Bad Comet and designed by Jamie Bloom, Life of the Amazonia is a game about managing your resources to build your options and choices to ultimately place animals into specific habitats to gain points at the end of the game. The points are further supplemented by end game scoring cards (some of which are a game clinchers) that you acquire during game play and bonuses for the numbers of trees you plant or the number of tile hexes you put together.
Amazonia is quite a unique proposition out of the box, lots of animeeples, tile hexes, resource tokens and stuff to construct - little boats and storage units for the resources and a folding waterfall acting as a cascade to move your tokens along progression tracks. I’ll come back to the components later in this review, but first, the gameplay.
This is a real puzzle, actually, and really effectively uses the bag building mechanism to allow you to build up your different token resource strengths - money, water, leaves etc to enable you to place different animals into your habitat. Before you do that, you need to start to build your habitat with tile hexes of different terrains - water, forest or land as each animal can only be placed into certain habitats and only score points if they are, for example, adjacent to trees or flowers or even other animals. It is, at times, a frustrating puzzle to manage your resources as the constraints are there - not enough space to place your animal, not enough resources to place your animal perhaps, or even a simpler choice of placing a tile versus trading up to a higher level token, knowing through the discard and bag management that you possibly won't see that token again for three or four turns.
Published by Bad Comet and designed by Jamie Bloom, Life of the Amazonia is a game about managing your resources to build your options and choices to ultimately place animals into specific habitats to gain points at the end of the game. The points are further supplemented by end game scoring cards (some of which are a game clinchers) that you acquire during game play and bonuses for the numbers of trees you plant or the number of tile hexes you put together.
Amazonia is quite a unique proposition out of the box, lots of animeeples, tile hexes, resource tokens and stuff to construct - little boats and storage units for the resources and a folding waterfall acting as a cascade to move your tokens along progression tracks. I’ll come back to the components later in this review, but first, the gameplay.
This is a real puzzle, actually, and really effectively uses the bag building mechanism to allow you to build up your different token resource strengths - money, water, leaves etc to enable you to place different animals into your habitat. Before you do that, you need to start to build your habitat with tile hexes of different terrains - water, forest or land as each animal can only be placed into certain habitats and only score points if they are, for example, adjacent to trees or flowers or even other animals. It is, at times, a frustrating puzzle to manage your resources as the constraints are there - not enough space to place your animal, not enough resources to place your animal perhaps, or even a simpler choice of placing a tile versus trading up to a higher level token, knowing through the discard and bag management that you possibly won't see that token again for three or four turns.
These are really fun choices as the game play is slick, and once you get used to the bag system you can be sorting out your tokens whilst other players take their turns. There are a limited numbers of animals on each of the 10 cards for each game, and with fours sets double sided that grade with increasing difficulty, replayability and challenge levels are good and variable. Each set of cards has different placement and scoring criteria so it keeps it fresh.
Each player also selects a companion or bonus animal that offers starting bonuses or slight buffs during game play, these are well balanced and usually require you to do something first to enable you to take advantage of it, and with the mini expansion, these companion animals were further bolstered so there is a huge selection to choose from, plus a further set of animal placement cards.
Early rounds are dominated by building up your resources, placing trees or tiles and thinking about an end game strategy - it's wise to spend water early to increase your holding token number from 1 to 3 to give you more resources to choose from and the ability to discard low value resource tokens is a must - over diluting your bag will almost certainly lose you the game. There is a little bit of luck with each draw from your bag but with careful management you can reduce this risk so as to increase your token values for the bigger, higher scoring animals later in the game. It is worth keeping an eye on what your opponent holds in their area to carry over if they are targeting a Cayman or a Jaguar, you might be able to sneak that away from them but you need a place to put it and that steal might come at a price of a low score for that placement.
Overall, the game play is engaging, fun and a puzzle to solve but it's not a brain burner so AP is pretty low and game time is 90 minutes for two players. This game really works at any player count as well, with the number of animals on placement cards increasing with more players. Notwithstanding that you will need some thinking time because your bag pull might be great and you might have more options that you thought but you won’t be sat there for ages. The game looks great in terms of the tiles and trees and the wooden screen printed animals are top notch. Your area of the amazon can get a little bit crowded and a little bit fiddly with trees and animals and such like but it's no major gripe.
My main issue with this game is the other component elements - not the bag or the tokens - the waterfall and the boats and the component storage trays / units. For the waterfall, we just laid it flat after trying to get it to stand up, the prows of the boats split when trying to build them and the component storage unit has these dividers that, well, just didn’t fit very well. You can see why a company would go to this extent in terms of a bit of production, make it feel special, unique and great to look at but in truth it all feels a bit over engineered. A small boat for discard tokens. A boat? Really? I mean, I’ve not stopped using 3d printed trays for components for every game I’ve played since they were invented. In these times of rising costs, the production cost of boats, and storage units could have brought the production cost down by say 10 - 15%? I’m not picking on this game in particular, loads of game have done it - The dice tower in Fate of the Fellowship, an hour to build, an hour to put back in the box, never used again - I own dice trays. I understand the will and desire to produce something that looks great or is intended to be additionally “functional”, but just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Don’t get me wrong, its coming from a good place - to enhance the gaming experience and add to that wow factor of having a stand up waterfall or a tiny boat in your play area - but the game is really good without that level of production.
So, who is this for - this is for anyone really. It doesn’t fall into any typical category so it can’t be pigeon holed into one - it has lovely animal meeples but it's not a cutesy game. It has some player interaction but isn’t just competitive solitaire, you can influence other players. There is an element of luck but it can be managed luck, if there is such a thing, and the theme is great and it looks great on the table. Set up time is ten minutes and there are loads of possible combinations of animals and tiles for replayability.
