Sloths have an unfair reputation for being lazy critters, but designer Friedemann Friese seems to reckon they’d do more vacation travelling if only other animals would give them piggybacks. I’m not entirely sure why holidays form the basis of 2019 boardgame Fast Sloths, but that doesn’t detract from the fun of this 45 minute, 2–5 player family game.
The aim of the game is to gain leaves from trees dotted around a hexagonal grid map. However, as a sloth, you’re reluctant—no, incapable—of travelling by yourself; instead, you have to coopt the different animals on the board into carrying you from tree to tree.
The hexes on the map represent different terrain types—forest, hills, plain, river, and so on—and different animal species can cross only certain terrains, which means getting from one tree to the next requires attracting the appropriate animals near enough to hop on, then letting them carry you across specific terrain towards your destination, before you hop back off, possibly collecting a leaf along the way. (One of the terrain types is designated ‘resort’ but since the sloths spend next to no time there, I’m not sure that’s enough to justify vacations being part of the description.)
Playing the Game
The map comes as 2 double-sided halves, offering 4 different maps in combination. (An expansion, The Next Holiday provides 2 more halves, allowing for more variation.) You select your map and drop one leaf for each player in all of the spaces containing trees.
Next, you choose 6 of the 12 animal types to play, stacking their cards in piles at the side of the board, with each set of cards in ascending numerical order. The game starts with no animals on the board, but on each turn, a player can place one animal anywhere they want (subject to terrain restrictions), until all the animals are on the board. If you prefer a little less randomness, the rulebook suggests the 6 animals to use for your very first game, along with where the animal tokens will be placed on the map, and publisher 2F-Spiele) has made a number of other ‘scenarios’ (i.e., animal selection and initial map placement) available as PDFs on the game’s web page.
In reverse order, players get to place their sloth on a tree of their choice, taking the correspondingly coloured leaf onto their player board.
Turn structure is: pick up some cards (at most 1 from each pile), optionally move an animal (by playing 1 or more cards of the same species from your hand), and discard down to a certain number of cards in your hand. The player boards serve as reminders of the turn steps, and the column below the rightmost retrieved leaf indicates how many cards you’re allowed to pick up and to hold across turns.
The distance (number of hexes) that can be travelled is the sum of the numbers on the played animal cards (with some tweaks—see the ‘Animals’ section later). As mentioned earlier, the cards are stacked in ascending order, which means the initial cards have fairly short distances, while later ones allow more steps to be taken. After the cards are used, they’re placed at the bottom of the appropriate stack in ascending order, thus when largest card for any animal is taken, the next will be a low value one.
Since the aim of the game is to take your sloth to those succulent leaves, a move will typically involve bringing the animal to the space occupied by your sloth or an adjacent one; the animal can then pick your sloth up; after that, you’ll move towards a leaf or to a hex from where you can be picked up next turn, and then the sloth jumps off. You don’t have to use all of your move steps, but movement ends as soon as the sloth hops off. You can also pick up leaves as you pass by, so don’t actually have to stop your movement on a tree space.
The first person to pick up their final leaf is the winner (more or less—the round continues until everyone had had the same number of turns, which might result in a tie, to be resolved based on the points people still hold in their hands).
Animals
The most interesting aspect of the game is how the animals differ. Besides being able to traverse different terrain, they have extra abilities—apart from the humble donkey, who just moves the number of spaces indicated on the card, and that’s it. Donkeys also can’t cross water, not even via bridges, so they can be stuck in certain regions of the map—i.e., if your remaining leaves are in donkeyless regions, picking up a donkey card is not the best thing you can do!
I’m not going to cover all the animals—they’re detailed in the rulebook, which is available online. Instead, I’ll highlight a few I really like.
When you climb off an animal, you can choose to end up in the same space as the animal or in an adjacent one. An elephant, though, can fling you up to 3 spaces farther (though not over mountains—there is a limit to their strength!). However, if you pass a space containing a leaf while in flight, you can’t pick it up.
The eagle can come to you from anywhere on the board. With other animals, you have to use as many movement steps as there are spaces between the animal and your sloth to get it close enough to pick you up, but you can summon the eagle directly to you; then use it to move you up to 6 spaces across any terrain. (As with being thrown by an elephant, you can’t pick up leaves in flight.)
My favourite beastie is the humble ant. They behave differently to the other animals in that they don’t carry you as such; instead, they provide bridges for you to move across. You assemble the ants into one or more chains from your current location to where you want to end up (using some of your movement points), then use a movement point to climb onto the first ant and zip across to the end of the chain, and can repeat that until your movement count is used up. Orangutans are similar, but rather than a bridge, they fling you similar to how the elephant works.
With only 6 animals per game, out of the complete collection of donkey, goat, rabbit, unicorn (!!), human, crocodile, dolphin, giraffe, elephant, eagle, orangutan and ant, there’s plenty of variation across games.
There is one tiny promo expansion, which introduces the chameleon. This doesn’t have an animal token itself, but its cards act as jokers and can be used to augment the movement count of any other animal type. I confess I’m surprised there haven’t been any other animal expansions.
Final Words
This really is a fun game to bring to the table, fairly easy to pick up, though you’ll be continually checking the movement rules sheet for the first handful of games.
It has a similar feel to Wandering Towers, where other players’ actions can totally destroy any plans you might have made—in the case of Wandering Towers, the keep that you were about to land in suddenly whizzes halfway around the board thanks to someone else putting their wizard in it; here, you might have arranged for the animal you want to use next to be within range, only to find that someone else wants the same animal and marches it far away.
With smaller numbers of players, there’s much less of this chaotic interaction, which can lead both games to being perhaps a little dull (or maybe I should say ‘more relaxed’) with just 2–3 players.
The one disappointment I have is the game tokens. While they’re nice chunky wood, the first thing you have to do when you open the box is apply stickers to indicate each animal type—feels a bit substandard, and screen printing or shaped meeples would have been much nicer, though I guess that would have bumped the price up a bit. Everything else about the game is high quality, with nice chunky map and player boards.
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.
