Australis
- Board's Eye View
- 42 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Don't be misled by the prominent turtles on the box lid: Australis isn't just about the turtles, which you're racing along a track. In this dice-drafting game by Leo Colovini and Alessandro Zuchini, the 2-4 players are also collecting fish and building coral reefs.
Players take turns drafting the custom six-sided dice. Blue dice let you move your turtle the number of spaces indicated on the die (2-7) but you leapfrog over other players' turtles in your path. Purple dice let you place out corals on the reefs corresponding to or numbered lower than the value of the die; these score for area control. Yellow dice let you collect fish or a mix of fish and points. You score for your fish to the extent that you have food for them, and the cubes representing fish food are collected as you progress along the turtle track. White dice let you take cards, or a mix of cards and points, from the market display. The cards get added to your tableau and give you a bonus next time you draft a die matching the card's colour. The single red die gives you no immediate benefit but if you take it you get to be the first player in the next round; depending on what gets rolled, this can sometimes prove to be a big advantage.
At the end of each round there's a 'dice competition' where players roll off against each other with all the dice that have numbers on them (ie: not the yellow and white dice). For each roll, you always eliminate dice with the lowest number rolled until there is a single die remaining. The winner of the dice competition gets to choose one of two tiles that gives them a benefit or just a bonus in points.
Australis is an easy-to-play and appealing family-friendly game. Players are offered meaningful choices between the different dice, tho' once you've decided on which colour to take there's usually little doubt over which is the best die of that colour to nab. Often the tactical choice over which colour die to go for is determined by the differentials between dice of the same colour. The cards add a light engine-building aspect to the game. There's no denying that the dice competition roll-offs are a lot of fun tho' the dice battle seems out of place in relation to the ecological theme. Maybe we need to think of those critters on the box lid as Snapping Turtles :-)
