Rewild: South America by Bruno Liguori Sia

Rewild: South America is a beautiful tableau building game - I mean seriously just look at this art! The key work is in attracting plants and animals to your 3 separate biomes (Scrubland, Grassland, and Rainforest) to make the best point-scoring tableau across the 3.

It’s less of an engine-building game, like Wingspan is for example, as the primary influence of the animal cards you attract is on scoring conditions either triggered immediately on playing the animal or scored at the end of the game. The animals you play don’t affect the basic actions that you have available from turn to turn, instead those actions come from a hand of 7 cards where everything is available to you from the beginning of the game, but played actions are sent to a discard pile where they will stay until you take the harvest action, replenishing your hand.

As such, the game doesn’t have that feeling of the actions themselves gaining momentum that comes from some engine builders, where each action you take gets more and more complex as the game progresses, as various triggers fire. In its place is a growing sense that the blank canvas you started with is pushing in a particular direction - whilst you couldn’t know at the beginning what possibilities lay before you, now you’re searching for the perfect puzzle piece to make it all fit together.

The actions cards are themselves interesting - aside from the harvest card each action card has 2 actions on it, and provides certain symbols based on the action actually played, which can be utilised by scoring abilities on your animals. The 6 cards consist of a top half that allows the playing of a tile from one of the 3 biomes (2 cards each) and a bottom half, 3 of which correspond to upgrades for the biomes, and 3 provide a way to obtain additional minerals, water or seeds whilst one of the market areas has its cards cycled.

Put together this forces you to consider the cadence of your actions - you’re going to harvest at some point in the game, but when? And how many times?

The biomes themselves upgrade in different ways which gives them a much better feel to play with than just 3 colours of hexes. Scrubland, the cheap large expanses of land upgrade to go larger and use an extra hex. Grassland doesn’t upgrade in size, but becomes wetland, which provides more water to neighbouring tiles. Rainforest upgrades upwards with tall trees, providing more space for animals that can use it

Rewild has 3 decks of cards to fill your biomes with. 2 of the decks have a 1-per-turn restriction on them and put 3 cards into the market - Plants to spend your seeds on, and animals that have predation effects¹.

It would have been simple for the designer of the game to put the plants and predation effects in the main deck and only have one - but I appreciate the decision to have plants and predation always available like this. It makes the puzzle of how to put your biomes together much more strategic as you’re less subject to the whims of the market deck, and more able to pay attention to getting the correct plant for your strategy, and have the ability to time when to attract predators to your board.

But it’s the main wildlife deck that contains some key design decisions that makes the game feel how it does. The game ends after someone has 8 animals in play, or 9 in the expert mode. There are abilities on the action cards that can move the wildlife deck along, but thus far they’ve been rarely used. That adds up to seeing, in a 2-player game, perhaps as few as 20 cards from the wildlife deck of 57, a deck that contains no repeats. Indeed, 4 games in I was seeing new animals that I’d not noticed in the previous games.

I get the same feel from the player board. You have 3 biomes to work with. Should you choose to work in the scrubland you will fill the board up more rapidly as each scrubland tile, which is cheap to play resource wise, takes 3 hexes and upgrades into a 4th. But shun the scrubland and focus on the more expensive grassland or rainforests and you will use a lot less of your board.

Compare this to a game like Ark Nova - often when presented with a player board you have an expectation that you will fill the board, or near fill it, by the end of the game, and so your decision making is more in the timing of how you utilise the space available. Not so in this game. You are far from guaranteed to be able to use the full space of the board, so there is genuine choice over whether to push to the corners where the large point scoring options are, or use the scattered water and mineral discounts available for speed of development.

A key feature of the wildlife market is that whilst you’re limited to 1 predation effect and 1 plant card per turn, you’re not especially limited from the main wildlife deck, except that there are only 5 cards on display and the display doesn’t refresh until the end of your turn, so you are mechanically limited to a maximum of 5 wildlife at once. This is again a very interesting design choice, because if there’s nothing in the market you particularly want right now, the better option might be to hold off and wait. You’re not losing some opportunity by passing a turn without attracting wildlife - if the animal in question is still there next turn you could take it and another and never feel like you are behind in development compared with the other players.

This serves to give the choice you make at the market a far more strategic bent than it otherwise would - every time you take an animal you feel you should be taking one because it fits the rest of your tableau and board, not just because you can and it would be a waste of something precious to choose not to.

The rulebook and cards delineate a basic and an expert mode. In expert mode:

This is presented as a modular choice of which alterations you play with each time, however I don’t really think that’s necessary. Whilst I can imagine someone thinking that the base game is a mite too fast and opting to end at 9 animals without bringing the rest of the expert baggage with them, there really isn’t much to be gained by, say, adding the 7 expert cards to the plant deck and not swapping out the animal cards.

Actually, the animal EX cards are themselves an interesting choice - the expert mode cards add placement rewards to 24 of the animals. Strategically these reward you for laying out your biome tiles in a certain pattern⁴ in a manner reminiscent of playing Harmonies, aesthetically they reward you by giving you more gorgeous wooden meeples to play with.

It would have been simple to have the placement rewards on the 24 cards anyway, and just tell you to ignore them if you’re not playing EX mode - but I did appreciate that they’d taken the effort to print the 24 base cards without the placement rewards on them as the card is that much cleaner to read and you wouldn’t be left feeling like you’re deliberately leaving part of the game out. No-one playing the base game with you will feel like you’re playing the baby rules and not the proper rules.

That said, I can’t see me ever playing the base rules again, the expert rules work very well and I even introduced the game to one of my friends immediately on expert mode - he coped fantastically. I haven’t yet tried the solo mode to compare.

I have to commend Marc Dur’s work on the rulebook here. Taking a leaf from his recent work on the Zoo Tycoon boardgame, the rulebook takes effort to mark out rules that are especially important, rules that are doubled on the overview card (Oh! That’s what that means), sections of the rulebook that aren’t rules per se, but more a flavourful contextualisation of the rules, and some tips and comments from the designers.

For an example of contextualisation, they often in the rulebook refer to an animal with a predation ability “eating” another animal. It might not immediately make sense that whilst you cover one card with another, you do not remove any of the pawprint markers that denote an area of land as being in use. In context, that’s because you don’t have one individual animal eating another individual animal - rather you’ve introduced a species to the ecosystem that uses the other species as a food source. It’s a valuable concession to the language that players actually use when playing the game.

I do have 2 small gripes about the card design however. Given that herbivores and predators can exist in both the wildlife and predation decks, from across the table the icons for the small herbivore and small predator are just a little too alike and I would have liked some kind of coloured background behind the icon to assist. Perhaps green for herbivore and red for predator, or perhaps going the whole way, green for plant, blue for insect, yellow for herbivore and red for predator. I don’t know the precise solution, but there’s definitely room for one.

Secondly, with the EX animals that have placement bonuses, it took me far too long to realise that some of the placement bonuses were specifically for wetland, the upgraded version of grassland. This icon is far too similar to the icon for grassland, with the colouring and sizing as it is at card size, and this is exacerbated by the fact that the only other place this icon is seen is on the lower left of the card telling you where the animal can live - and that only ever shows the grassland icon as wetland and grassland are treated the same for animal attraction.

Bruno Liguori Sia has taken some bold design decisions with Rewild: South America and it’s certainly my opinion that these have paid off. The game is clearly Bruno’s love letter to Brazil and Latin America, with which he wants to raise awareness of species at risk of extinction - indeed a page of the rulebook is dedicated to listing the species in the game with their IUCN Red List Conservation Status.

Crucially however he has also made a very good game with built-in replayability. It’s been a while since I’ve felt the urge to play the same game 4 times across 2 weeks but this one fascinated me³.

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