Beasts
- Board's Eye View
- 48 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Designed by Clarence Simpson and published by Pandasaurus, Beasts is a cooperative card game for 2-5 players. It's played with a deck of 72 cards, comprising numbers 1-9 in each of four suits, but with those cards all duplicated in 'broken suit' versions. This means that tho' there are just four suits for players' ordinary play, they are treated as eight distinct suits when the 'Beast' cards take effect. There will ordinarily be four Beast cards added to the deck.
Players always have a hand of five cards. On your turn you choose one suit and play all the cards of that suit (broken and unbroken) to a shared 100s, 10s and units number. You can play your cards in any order but the three-digit number you create must always be larger than the previous number. That means if you have 2 and 9 clubs, you could play the 2 first to create 002 and then play the 9 on the 2 to create 009. If the next player decides to play hearts and has the 1 and 3, they can play the 1 to the 10s, giving them the option of removing all of the units cards to re-set the units to zero (010) before playing the 3 to the units to raise the total to 013.
The objective is to get all 72 cards played, so it follows that you want to advance the counter by as little as possible. You collectively lose if a player cannot play a card from their hand; tho' the game comes with three tokens that can be spent to discard a card. These, in effect, give three potential reprieves from losing. And this is a limited communication game: you can't reveal the contents of your hand - tho' you can, for example, give a warning that you might be forced to make a big number jump on your next turn.
The wrinkle is the Beast cards. If you draw one of these, you first display it and on your next turn you must play cards matching that Beast's suit and you must play the Beast card on top of the units column. This is where the broken/unbroken suits come in because the Beast will show either a broken or unbroken suit and it will, for the rest of the game, block any cards of that type from being placed below it. So, for example, the broken diamonds Beast atop the units column will block any broken diamond cards from being played to that column but will have no effect on the ordinary diamond suit cards.
When you draw a Beast card you don't play it immediately but on your next turn, so other players have a chance to prepare for its arrival. Tho' a Beast card blocks any further matching suit cards from being played beneath it, if it is played above a column where there is already a matching suit it is 'startled' and moves to the next column (the 10s). If there's a matching suit card already there, it is startled again and moved to the 100s, and it can in this way even be startled out of play. This opportunity to anticipate the arrival and effect of a Beast actually makes this game notably easier at higher player counts: in a five-player game, there will be four other players potentially setting up the counter so that the Beast will be startled.
Beasts is attractively presented, with gold-foil cards and some impressive artwork from Paulina Linjama. It is easy to play and you can expect to complete a game in a filler-length 20 minutes. It can be very challenging with just two players, especially if Beast cards come out early. If you're playing with four or five players and finding it too easy to startle the Beasts, you can try one of the variations suggested in the rules where you reduce the number of discard tokens and/or increase the number of Beast cards. Played with all eight Beast cards and no discard tokens, you'll find this game very hard to beat - even with five players.