One of the first games (possibly the first) from FryxGames was 2011’s Wilderness, a game of survival in, well, a wilderness. After a shipwreck, 2–8 players are racing to the nearest village, searching for food and water, while avoiding hazards like predators and sickness. After being out of print for over a decade, a second version of the game has just arrived on Gamefound – besides a new solo mode, the artwork’s been given a bit of a brush up and the game’s tokens have been improved, but little else has been said about changes from the original.
On each turn, a player can perform a number of actions depending on their energy level. One action is to move to another tile, where the tile type determines what happens next- e.g., you can search for food (roll a die for how much food you get) on a forest or grassland tile, but it costs more energy to search the forest; or if you’re next to water, you can drink. Other actions include resting, which recovers some energy, or playing event cards, which usually have beneficial effects. After performing actions, you update your thirst, hunger and energy stats. When all players have taken their turn, any animals revealed on the map take their turn, moving towards players and attacking them. Before the next round, time moves bringing along various weather effects; additionally, night falls every fourth round, when players can’t search for food and draw a sickness card on each movement. Besides losing energy as the result of a bad choice, one calamity that can befall players is getting lost, which has you sent off in a random direction, and if you’re prevented from travelling in that direction (e.g., edge of the map or beside an impassable river), you instead lose all your energy. The whole game map is not initially revealed, and comprises a number of randomly arranged sections, only one of which is face up to begin; when you move into a new region, you turn that tile face up. Death is always a possibility in this game, but starting from scratch is offered as an option – it’s difficult to tell how much of a setback that actually is, given that players’ main tasks are to survive; I guess it depends how close someone is to the village.
This is a game which seemed to be popular on initial release, but clearly not sufficiently popular for FryxGames to print any since 2014 – I guess the juggernaut that is Terraforming Mars was more appealing! Still, this game looks interesting, and I’ll be keeping an eye on the project.
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.
