When I first encountered pictures of Stag, I couldn’t help but think of Mycelia —and yes, it turns out they are both the product of designer J.J. Neville: same gorgeous art style, similar-ish game mechanisms, same high production quality.
Gameplay Summary
In 1–4-player game Stag, you grow beetles from grubs, through pupae, to adult beetles, with the possibility of a battle at the end. As with Mycelia, part of the game involves playing cards into a space on a neat dual-layered player mat containing a number of chunky wooden tokens, then moving the corresponding token to the common playing are. This is the point at which the two games diverge, though.
Besides the player mat for beetle cards, each player has an action mat and action tiles; on each turn, the tiles are arranged in the mat to select which actions the player wishes to perform. Each tile shows 3 different actions, and can be slid up or down in the mat to select one of them, as well as arranged to perform the selected actions in an appropriate order (e.g., making sure you acquire resources before you want to spend them). The spaces not covered by the action tiles show resources which the player will collect at the end of the turn.
The available actions are:
• Grow a grub—choose a card from your hand and pay its egg cost, then place it on one of the 2 spaces on the left of your player mat; this frees up a grub token to be placed on the main board, which I’ll talk about later.
• Grow a pupa—chose one of the (up to) 2 grubs on your player mat and pay its resource and time cost, and move it right on the player mat; the grub token is returned to the now emptied slot, and a pupa token placed on the main board, gaining a trait token (moving up the corresponding trait track).
• Grow a beetle—this is a similar move from your grub space to the beetle space, returning the pupa token to the player mat and placing a beetle token on the main board.
• Pick up a card—add a card to your hand, up to a maximum of 5.
• Gain eggs—required to produce grubs and to pay for some other actions.
• Age a pupa or grub—the player mat contains time tracks used in the early stages of the beetle’s lifecycle, and you move up these tracks to provide the time cost required when transitioning between grub and pupa or pupa and juvenile beetle.
• Exchange resources—swap what you have for what you need.
• Move up a trait track.
• Upgrade an action tile—flip it to show stronger actions.
• Tuck a card from your hand—taking advantage of either the boon or bonus on the card, but that card can no longer be played as a beetle.
I’ve mentioned the main board a few times. This consists of 3 rings, one for each stage of the beetle’s life, as well as a central ‘showdown’ area. At the beginning of each turn (apart from the first), the pupa ring is rotated one slot, affecting bonuses available to each player.
When playing a grub, you place it in one of the empty slots in the outer ring sharing the same trait icon as the beetle card. When you play a pupa, you place the pupa token in the slot on the pupa track adjacent to your grub token; the pupa ring is populated with trait tokens, so you want to ensure your initial grub placement and pupa growth timing are such that you can gain the trait token that benefits you most. Besides moving up the corresponding trait tracks, these tokens can contribute to various set building objectives. Playing a beetle is similar, such that you place your beetle token in a slot adjacent to the pupa token, gaining a point bonus unless someone got there first.
The last stage of the beetle’s life in the game occurs when they’ve accumulated their final growth requirements, at which point its token is flipped to the ‘fed’ side. If 2 or more beetles are flipped at the end of a turn, a showdown takes place. This is a Prisoner’s Dilemma [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma] sort of social game: each player can choose either to Forage or to Fight. In the 2 beetle case, if both players Forage, they each get modest rewards; if one Fights and the other Forages, the first gets loads of points; if both Fight, they lose out on points, traits and their beetle cards (missing out on whatever point score was shown on the cards). There are extensions of this mechanism for 3 and 4 beetle showdowns. After the showdown, the beetle tokens are returned to player mats, ready for the next pupa to burst forth. Beetle cards which have not been lost in the showdown are returned to players, providing scoring points at the end of the game.
There can be only a finite number of showdowns (5 normally, but the rulebook suggests 4 or 6 for a shorter or longer game), and the game finishes after the final one. End scores come from points on cards, objectives, positions on the trait tracks, and points gained in showdowns.
Apart from the showdown, pretty much all of each turn can be played simultaneously, which can speed things along nicely, but does make for a rather quiet multi-player solitaire game. Any contention (e.g., for the same grub or beetle slot on the main board) is resolved via a hierarchy list, which essentially lets each player have a turn at going first in such conflicts.
Finally, the game includes solo play in which random draws simulate actions of 3 opponents. Note that this isn’t a full automa and can’t win the game; the solo mode is simply beat your own high score.
Crowdfunding Campaign
Stag has a fairly polished Kickstarter campaign page, with links to the rulebook and a handful of how-to-play videos. The page includes a refreshingly clear description of the differences between the variants of the game on offer.
As with Mycelia, the standard edition is already quite plush, and the deluxe edition similarly includes a bunch of wooden tokens. While they are certainly nice, I’m not sure the extra cost is warranted given how good the standard version is already. A step beyond deluxe is a ‘deluxe art’ edition which bundles in a book of illustrations and a print.
The pièce de résistance is the ‘opulent’ version, which will give you wooden game and player boards, all inside a natty wooden box, for a cool £800. That’s definitely not for me, though looking at the campaign page, I see that 5 backers (at time of writing) have opted for it.
On the subject of campaign numbers, the game is clearly popular, with over 1,000 backers after just a single day.
Final Words
Stag is a lovely looking game, with an interesting mapping of nature to gameplay. Like Mycelia, though, I suspect it’ll need the right group of gamers to get to the table very often.
The campaign timeline indicates that the pledge manager will close in January, so there’s no rush to back the project right now. (Often, pledge managers are open only to people who’ve backed the campaign, but one of the FAQs here states ‘when we launch the pledge manager you should be able to join the party later.’) On the topic of timescales, shipping is predicted for August 2027, a whole year away.
Now, if you’re prepared to wait that long, is it worth waiting a bit longer for retail…? If the game follows Mycelia’s path, both standard and deluxe versions will be available in retail. To be frank, the bar is high before I’ll back a crowdfunding project—there are just too many risks, not to mention that my tastes might have changed in the long time between backing and receiving the game. However, this one seems to be well-managed, and the comments on Neville’s previous campaign are generally positive (and where there are problems, he’s usually been quick to respond), so I confess I’m on the horns of a dilemma, but at least I can dither until January.
About the author
Current favourite boardgames are Ark Nova and Paleo, with a side of Terraforming Mars and Rebirth. 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 here 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.
