Whilst not in any way a game related to the Finding Nemo IP, I’ve decided it’s nigh-on impossible to play this colourful title without at least one reference to Crush and his journey on the East Australian Current. Let’s find out more together...
Introduction
Australis is a charming dice drafting game for 2-4 players that has us taking on the roles of turtles riding the East Australian Current (hereafter EAC for the sake of typing) as we try to make our way along the famous current, build up coral reefs and feed growing schools of fish all in the name of acquiring victory points.
It does have a genuine beauty about it, with the pastel colours and the artwork on the board all combining to create this faux ecosystem that grows round by round. Mechanically it works well – it’s far from complex and is definitely a good family game. I do think there are a few edges that, having played it, I might have tried to round off, but nothing’s a showstopper here.
First you were all like, whoa!
Setup begins in a very traditional fashion – placing the board in the middle of the table so everyone can reach it. We place the different coloured dice on their spaces (1 per colour per player) as well as adding the larger red die into its own spot. We’ll also create a supply of the large and small fish, setting them to the side. This is the first edge I’d be smoothing out, as the artwork for both sizes of fish is the same, and the size difference is relatively negligible. I can’t imagine that a different artistic style would have been creatively complex, but it would have done a fair amount to help distinguish these at a glance. I only have to glance at my shelf to see Finspan reminding me a 1 fish/3 fish token system is easily done.
We’ll take our own player board, as well as coral, turtle, point discs and food cubes in our preferred colour, giving ourselves a bit of room to later place cards below the board. The cards themselves (‘advantage cards’) are shuffled and six are laid out to create an initial market. Our food cubes are added to predetermined spaces on the EAC and our scoring disc on turtle are placed in clockwise order on sequential spaces, starting with the first player.
Finally, place the gold and silver competition tiles on their respective slots, with the lowest numbers on top of each pile.
And then we were all like, whoa!
The game runs for five rounds, with the competition tiles acting as the overall game timer. It’s a little subtle at first, but does make sense as you start playing.
Rounds are broken down into three phases:
1. Dice selection and dice action
2. Point scoring for coral, fish and turtles
3. The Dice Competition (more on the name of this below)
Dice selection and action begins with whoever has the starting tile – this will be determined randomly in round 1. The tile is placed next to the red die and then the player takes any one of the available dice, placing it on their sea board and carrying out its action. For the purpose of this review, I’m going to talk about the four colours of dice – namely white, yellow, blue and purple – but there is always that solitary red die as an option too – it just feels disingenuous to include it as a category, given that there’s only one of them. You’ll draft clockwise until everyone has four dice, leaving one unchosen on the main board.
These dice do different things and will lead you towards either trying to balance your actions, or specialise in certain areas over others:
- White dice – award you points and/or advantage cards depending on the symbols showing on their face
- Yellow dice – award you points and/or fish
- Blue dice – allow you to move your sea turtle along the EAC
- Purple dice – let you place coral on the corresponding reef number
Importantly, if any of the areas on your sea board have advantage cards associated with them, you resolve those before the die. I’ve mentioned advantage cards a couple of times already so lets take a deeper dive (dive?) into those.
Give me some fin!
Advantage cards live in the market we created during setup, and are acquired by choosing the white die as you draft during the dice selection phase. They give you little bonuses such as an additional points, single move of your turtle, a fish, or placing a coral in the area adjacent to your turtle. Not necessarily game changing, but you can potentially make some nice combos e.g. moving your turtle a space even by taking the yellow fish die.
You can never have carbon copies of cards, so you couldn’t stack multiple turtle moves under the same individual colour, but you could have four turtle moves, one under each colour. It’s a small but important distinction that can affect your choice from the market.
There’s also an interesting quirk that you have two choices whenever you draw an advantage card – use it immediately and gain its benefit at once, or place it under your sea board and get that benefit every time you place a die of that colour for the rest of the game. The former choice hasn’t really materialised in any of the games I’ve played, but I can see how it could be useful in theory. It does also mean that you could theoretically take a carbon copy card and use it immediately so it’s not placed with its twin under your sea board. Again - this has been an edge case in my experience.
A note on the “add a coral to the reef adjacent to your turtle” action, and again this is a creative point. The reefs are identified by the colour of the EAC spaces. These colour gradients are pretty minimal and I’d say if you have additional visual needs when gaming, you might struggle here. I appreciate making them less subtle would have compromised the overall aesthetic, but that’s less of a concern if people can’t actually play your game.
Mr Turtle is my father
The second part of the round is the point scoring phase. Coral reef points are awarded on an area majority basis, with ties being settled in favour of whoever’s turtle is furthest along the EAC. Fish score you points for the largest school of fish you can feed. You start with a single food cube, but can pick up others as you travel along the EAC (and via some competition tiles) meaning that while you can collect as many fish as you like, you’ll only score points for those that you can feed with your food cubes.
Turtles score points equal to the space they occupy on the EAC. What’s nice here is that nobody can occupy the same space as another player. If you’d ever end up on an occupied space then congrats – you move forward an extra space!
This step is usually pretty quick and you’ll fly through it as you get into the rhythm of the game!
You’re riding it dude. Check it out!
The third and final phase of a round is the underwhelmingly named “Dice Competition” where the general theme of turtles on the EAC seems to have been entirely forgotten for some reason. We’ll get to that in a moment, but the essence is “everyone rolls their dice, lowest numbered dice are returned to the main board and then the last one standing gets first choice of a competition tile, with the runner up taking the top tile from the unchosen pile.”
It brings you full circle into deciding to choose dice in the first phase that give you things you want, versus picking the blue/purple/red dice as these are the numbered dice you need to have to take part in this phase. In amongst the advantage cards, there are some that boost the value of your rolled dice by 1 in a particular colour which may impact the overall result.
This phase feels oddly flat. In a two player game, you’re guaranteed to take a competition tile as long as you’ve selected one blue/purple/red die so there’s a different set of decisions there. In a three player game, one person misses out every time and as these are worth increasingly large points as the game progresses, it can be quite a divide.
Weirdly though, it’s not the luck element that makes this odd - though that does stand out when everything else feels like there’s agency to it – it’s the fact it’s called The Dice Competition just knocks all the thematic wind out of your sails. If Finding Nemo has taught us anything, it’s that riding the EAC is a tumultuous, frantic affair that needs skills, expertise and balance to do it successfully. And I think that’s what this phase is trying to represent. I’m just not sure “my 7 beats your 5” is a compelling way to do it.
Final thoughts
It is a good game, no doubt about that. It definitely exceeded my expectations from the first time I played it. It looks beautiful, it (mostly) leans into the theme very well and it’s not a complicated teach by any stretch. I don’t think it outstays its welcome on the table and as I said in the intro, it lands at a good level for families while giving more experienced board gamers something to get stuck into.
The balance of strategy and choice in the first part of each round does seem oddly negated by the dice free-for-all at the end, but I’m not such a curmudgeon that I can’t overlook it.
Definite recommend for families or those taking more formative steps into the world of board gaming.
