In Friedemann Friese’s quick 2–5 player board game Fast Sloths, your aim is to traverse a hexagonal grid map collecting leaves from trees dotted across the landscape. The catch is, that as a sloth, you’re reluctant to travel under your own steam; instead, you have to persuade other animals to carry you from place to place.
The hexes on the map represent different terrain types—forest, hills, plain, river, and so on—and different animal species can traverse only certain terrains, which means getting from one tree to the next requires selecting appropriate animals near enough to hop on, then letting them carry you across the terrains they’re allowed on, before you hop back off, ideally collecting a leaf along the way.
Setup
Players choose a sloth board and take the sloth token of the matching colour.
The map comprises 2 double-sided halves, offering 4 different maps in combination. You select a map configuration and drop one leaf for each player in all of the spaces containing trees.
Next, choose 6 of the 12 animal types to play, stacking their cards face up in piles at the side of the board, with each set of cards in ascending numerical order (smallest values on top). Page 6 of the rulebook provides a suggestion for animal combinations to avoid problems with, as they put it, ‘limited access to certain terrain types.’
The game starts with no animals on the board, but if you prefer more structure, the rulebook suggests the 6 animals to use for your very first game, along with where the animal tokens should be placed on the map before play starts, as shown in the image above, set up for a 3-player game. Publisher 2F-Spiele has made a number of additional scenario PDFs available on the game’s web page for choosing and placing animals. (Scenario 0 is the same as the one in the rulebook.)
In reverse order, players get to place their sloth on a tree of their choice, taking the correspondingly coloured leaf onto the first space at the top of their sloth board. Sloths can’t share trees at this point, though there can be multiple sloths on the same space after play starts.
That’s it, you’re ready to play.
Animal Cards
Before describing how you play, I’d better explain the animal cards.
Each card has a number on it, which gives an indication of how far that animal can travel: mostly simply the number of spaces it can move, but some animals move in mysterious ways.
The donkey is the simplest of the critters: a card with the number 2 means it can move 2 spaces, 3 means 3 spaces and so on. You can play multiple cards of the same type on your turn, so if you have donkey cards 2 and 3, you can use both to move 5 spaces—or rather, up to 5 spaces, as you can choose to stop early. I’ve already mentioned being able to traverse different terrain: donkeys can trek across resorts, forests, hills and plains. (You don’t have to remember all the names; just match the colours and textures marked on the right of the cards with the board hexes.) Donkeys can’t traverse mountains or rivers, and significantly, nor can they enter bridge hexes—i.e., there’s no way to use a donkey to cross a river. This means if during the game, you’re in a part of the board separated from the rest by a river, and there are no donkeys in that region, donkey cards are of rather limited immediate value; they can be useful once you’ve crossed, so you might want to keep hold of the cards, if your hand limit permits.
For most species, an animal picks you up any time during its journey when its token passes through the space containing your sloth or spaces immediately adjacent to it; similarly, you can choose to hop off into the space containing the animal or an adjacent one. An elephant, though, can fling you up to 3 spaces farther (but not over mountains—there is a limit to their strength!). If you pass a space containing a leaf while in flight, you can’t pick it up (see later about gaining leaves). Elephants can travel only across plain and river terrain, limiting their movement, and have a penalty in that you have to subtract 1 from the total value of all the cards you use—that’s 1 from the total, not from each card.
Conversely, crocodiles add 1 to the total movement value. They’re limited to rivers and immediately adjacent resorts, forests and plains—i.e., they can’t travel inland.
The eagle has 2 very different modes of travel. You need to accumulate at least 6 movement points before you can use one at all, and then summon the eagle directly to you from anywhere on the board. Once you’re aboard, it can carry you up to 6 spaces (regardless of the total value of the cards you played) across any terrain bar rivers. (I have no idea why they’re reluctant to cross water—they can fly over bridges, but it seems not open rivers.) As with being thrown by an elephant, you can’t pick up leaves in flight.
Giraffes change how you’re picked up, using their long necks to pick you up at a distance of up to 2 hexes (rather than the normal 1), but not across mountains. They can likewise drop you off 2 spaces from where they are.
Switching up a gear, ants have a radically different mode of operation. You first use a portion of the played cards’ values to assemble the ants into one or more chains from your current location (or adjacent to it) to your destination. Generally, you move a single token of the chosen animal type, whereas with ants, you can move as many as you want. After getting the ants into position, as many times as you have remaining movement points, you spend 1 to climb onto the first ant and zip across to the end of the chain, hopping off there or an adjacent hex, and can repeat for the next chain. This means that, depending where the ants started their movement, it can be cheaper to traverse multiple chains than a single long one—crossing a hex between chains, a total distance of 2 spaces, costs only a single point (getting off the previous chain is free, and hopping onto a chain is 1 point), and you’re travelling farther than just the spaces containing ants.
In the first picture above, you can spend 2 points to move the 2 ants as shown by the red arrows. You can then traverse the double chain of ants all the way to the tree at a cost of only 2 further points: the red arrows indicate paying 1 movement point to hop on the chain, then being carried along the chain (the blue arrows) is free, as is jumping off an ant into an adjacent space.
Orangutans are similar to ants, but rather than a forming bridge, once assembled into a suitable spaced row, they fling you in the same way as the elephant at the cost of 2 points per throw—and remember, you can’t collect leaves when flying through the air.
There are a dozen animals in total in the base game (donkey, goat, rabbit, human, crocodile, dolphin, giraffe, elephant, eagle, orangutan, ant, and unicorn—yes, really). I’m not going to cover all of them, but check pages 6 to 8 of the rulebook for complete details along with movement examples, and remember to pay close attention which terrain they’re allowed to cross as well as their special abilities.
Incidentally, a Chameleon mini-expansion exists; the chameleon doesn’t have a token, but acts as a wildcard by imitating other animals, allowing its card values to augment the movement count of any other beast of burden.
Turn Structure
Your sloth board shows what you do each turn: draw several animal cards, move, discard down to a hand limit. As you accumulate leaves, you add them from left to right on the top row of the sloth board, and the column below the rightmost leaf on your board indicates how many cards you draw and what your hand limit is—the more leaves you have, the fewer cards you get to pick up, and the hand limit is smaller.
For the first few turns of the game, if you’re not using a scenario setup, there is one additional action at the start of a turn: choose an animal token and place it on any empty space on the board (subject to terrain restrictions). Actually, the rulebook doesn’t preclude placing the animal on the same space as a sloth, but there’s no benefit in doing so.
That being done, the first thing you do on your turn is pick up as many cards as indicated directly below that rightmost leaf—at most a single one from any given pile, so they must all be different animals. In some cases, you must discard a card from your hand after this—e.g., in the picture above, the column under the third leaf indicates that you take 3 cards, then discard 1 from anywhere in your hand, before moving on to the next step. When you discard a card, it goes to the bottom of the corresponding animal deck, so that the deck roughly always cycles in ascending value order (to a maximum shown with the description of the animal species) before resetting to the minimum.
After drawing cards, you may choose animal cards to play. This step is optional, so you can skip it if, say, you’re waiting to get a specific animal value count before committing to a move. You select cards from your hand of a single animal type (you can include chameleons if you have the expansion), and use the total of those points to move a single animal (multiple, in the case of ants and orangutans) that number of spaces across compatible terrain, bearing in mind the additional rules for some animals, such as calling the eagle to you.
If the animal passes through or adjacent to the space with your sloth, you can hop aboard. If the journey subsequently takes you through or beside a tree that still contains a leaf of your colour, you can grab the leaf and add it to your sloth board. At any point up to the maximum movement count, you can end the animal’s movement and jump off, onto the space containing the animal token or an adjacent one. Don’t forget to take advantage of a tree adjacent to that space, as an opportunity to gain a leaf. You always jump off, and can’t hog the animal to prevent anyone else from using it. Note that if the animal stopped on a bridge, the only valid adjacent spaces are the bridge-ending pair. Be aware that sloths can survive only on resorts, forests, hills, plains and bridges; you can never be dropped off on mountains or in the river (though you can be carried across them, of course). The terrain icons on the right of the sloth card serve as a reminder of which types are valid. Do take into account the various abilities of animals to throw and pick you up, and remember than ants and orangutans are very different, as explained earlier.
Animals can’t share spaces with other animals (except for the players’ sloths), though they can cross spaces containing them. Any number of sloths can be on the same space.
Finally, discard down to your card limit, indicated by the bottom row of your sloth board, below the current leaf position (which won’t be the same as when you started the turn if you picked up a leaf during the turn), 6 cards in the image above. You can dispose of any cards, not just those of the type of animal you used in the previous step. As mentioned above, when discarding cards, they go to the bottom of the appropriate deck, and if you discard multiple of the same time, arrange them in ascending order first.
The game end is triggered as soon as someone gains their eighth leaf (which means you don’t have to visit every tree on the board, just 8 out of the 9). Play until the end of the round, and the winner is the person with most leaves.
Ties are broken based on the total number of movement points in players’ hands. If there’s still a tie, then according to the rulebook, ‘you are all far too lazy to care. Take a break and enjoy your collected leaves!’
About the author
Current favourite boardgames are Ark Nova and Spooktacular, with a side of Dune: Imperium - Uprising and Paleo. When not playing games or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside over 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). In any time left over after all that, L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
