A two-player game (with a solo mode), Badgers is a ‘strategic card battler of positioning, timing, and survival’ from InterHuman Games. InterHuman says they strive ‘to make games that are easy to play by shifting the balance in favor of interaction instead of calculations, bookkeeping and statistics,’ and that seems to be the case here, where game time is estimated at 10–20 minutes and suitable for ages 8 and above.
The game is played on a 4×3 grid of forest path tiles, selected at random from 24 tiles in total. Each tile is part of a path your badgers can follow (towards your opponent) and shows a type of food, sometimes also an obstacle. Players work with individual decks chosen from 6 (actually, 4 more, now that the project’s stretch goals have been achieved) asymmetric decks of badger cards—or ‘clans’—each of which has, besides a cute drawing of a badger, the food it likes, its strength in battle and various abilities. Cards can be played face up or face down; in the latter case, you can’t collect food or use the badger’s ability—a question that may come to mind here is: why would you do that? It can set up a trap for your opponent, hiding your true strength, or there may be modifiers elsewhere which make this the better option for some cards. Actually, the rule book is a bit hazy on the use of face-down cards, so I confess some of this is guesswork—what is certain is that face-down badgers don’t block paths.
You start the game with 3 badgers from your deck in your hand and the goal is to collect more food than your opponent, a large part of which means laying down more cards and fighting existing badgers to take over spaces.
On your turn, you first play a badger onto the board. You can’t place a card into a space beyond either an obstacle or an opponent’s face-up badger card (i.e., face-down cards do not impede progress), but any space between you and the blockage is also fair game, though it makes strategic sense to press forward as far as you can.
If you play face-up into an empty space, you can activate your badger’s ability, if it does anything applicable, then collect food if the badger graphic matches the one on the space.
If you play into a space containing your own badger, you discard the existing card and play as if the space had been empty.
If you play into a space containing an opponent’s badger (face up or down), it’s time for a fight. Each player’s total strength is whatever is displayed on the card, plus anything coming from the ability on the card—there are separate modifiers for attack and defence. However, if the existing card had been played face down, it is turned over before battle, enabling its ability (if it relates to combat) and bonuses. If you win, discard the opposing card, and play as if in the space had been empty; if you are defeated, leave the defender face up and discard your own badger.
Finally, draw cards from your deck up to 3 in your hand. If your draw deck is empty and you have fewer than 3 cards in your hand, the game is over for you, but your opponent continues to play until they have fewer than 3 cards left too. The winner is whoever has most food.
Badger abilities offer a range of actions and bonuses, each clan having different distributions and types of ability. For example, ‘Idol’ allows you to discard another badger on your board to add 10 to this card’s battle strength, or ‘Tenacious’ lets you take a defeated badger back into your hand instead of discarding it. Some badgers can work as teams, such that you get bonuses based on how many other badgers you have with the matching abilities.
Final Words
This does look like a quick, fun game, with easy rules and cute artwork. The random forest layout and asymmetric decks add to replayability.
One interesting feature of this campaign is that InterHuman offers a Print and Play version of the game, for considerably less than the physical boxed copy—in the project’s FAQ, they say this is because ‘We want our games to be played!’
Besides the base game and P&P variant, you can pay a bit more for a themed lapel badge or a set of 8 fridge magnets—er, right… You can also get a natty—if somewhat expensive—wooden box for your cards.
About the Author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). 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.
