Life of the Amazonia
- Board's Eye View
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
We enjoyed playing Bad Comet's Wild: Serengeti but we'd have to admit that the standout feature of that game wasn't so much the gameplay or mechanics but rather the array or wooden animal meeples. There are more, even better wooden animal meeples in Life of the Amazonia but this time they are complementing a game that's excellent in its own right.
Ecology and ecosystems have become popular themes for board games, and in Life of the Amazonia the 1-4 players (solitaire if you play against the automata) are building their own habitats in which they are placing out trees, plants and animals that will score for the synergies they create. You might recognise some similarities with the 2022 Spiel des Jahres winner Cascadia (AEG) but Jamie Bloom's design is a couple of steps up in complexity. It's a 'bag builder' in that players will each turn be drawing five tokens from their individual bag and then utilising those tokens; in effect, a deck-building game but with tokens instead of cards. Currency tokens can be spent to buy stronger tokens to be added to your bag. Specific combinations of fruit, water and tree tokens are used to pay the cost of adding animals to your habitat. Leaf and water tokens additionally let you move along tracks on a central waterfall board so that you can add terrain to extend your habitat and add trees and aquatic flowers to your terrain. Players can also buy nature cards: insect cards for a single-use action or scenery cards for end-game scoring bonuses.
With several different resources in play and various ways to use them, players are likely to have quite a lot of options on their turn. Happily tho' Life of the Amazonia doesn't give rise to excessive AP (Analysis Paralysis) because players draw their next set of tokens at the end of their turn: you know precisely what tokens you'll have available to you on your next turn so you can plan the actions you'll take while other players are taking their turns; in a two- or three-player game, this makes for snappy turns with almost no downtime. Most of our games have run to around 90 minutes, tho' the rules suggest options for a shorter game by simply reducing the number of animals in set up.
This is a game that offers lots of different ways to score points so there's no 'best' or 'broken' strategy. There are alternative versions of the cards showing the requirements of each animal, so there's plenty of replayability, and that's before you ponder all the variants offered in the rulebook. Players all start with their own unique animal which can give them an ongoing asymmetric ability but you'll need to build a suitable habitat for your unique animal before you are able to deploy it. In our plays at Board's Eye View we've generally found that satisfying the requirements of their unique animals tended to help focus players' early turns.
Production quality for Life of the Amazonia is high, as we've come to expect from Bad Comet. The colourful wooden animal meeples are beautiful, as is the art from Sophia Kang. We like the cardboard boats that you discard your tokens into; you tip them back into your draw bag when that is empty. If you're worried that the tokens may eventually wear after extensive handling, you could consider 'sleeving' them in coin capsules, as we did with Quacks of Quedlinburg (Schmidt Spiele). It's just the 3D waterfall that we found unnecessarily fiddly because it needs to be disassembled after each play in order to fit it back in the box; much as we love 3D board game components we'd have been just as happy to have had a flat less-fiddly board for the various tracks.
