Tembo
Designed by Asger Aleksandrov Granerud, Mads Fløe, Dan Halstad and Daniel Skjold Pedersen, Tembo is a cooperative game for 1–4 players from Sidekick Games and The Op. It's subtitled Survival on the Savanna and it's a game where you are trying to get your herd of elephants across the savanna. Tembo is the Swahili word for elephant.
You need to trace a path from the start to a destination tile but you have to unlock the spaces on the destination tile by visiting all six of the printed landmarks en route. You lose if a player loses all of their elephants, both on and off the board, or if the players get to the end of an energy track. You also lose if the two lions both end up on the same tile as the Matriarch elephant which starts off on the board. The deck of cards from which you draw at the end of each turn acts as a game timer too; you lose if it runs out. The game is played on a modular board that you can vary to adjust the difficulty level.
Players play a card from their hand to take the action indicated by the space they cover up (mostly manipulating their supply of elephants) or, discarding the card to place elephants out onto the board. A card that moves the Matriarch elephant will consume energy but will return elephants back to your supply. Holding onto a Matriarch card means taking a push-your-luck gamble because if you pick up another you'll be forced to play them both and take an additional energy penalty. If you draw a Lion card you have to play it immediately. It moves the lions orthogonally towards the nearest elephant and when a lion is on the same square as a player's elephant, that elephant is removed from the game...
The art from Vincent Dutrait and the attractive presentation, with screenprinted wooden elephant meeples, all add to Tembo's thematic immersion, but this is at its heart a cooperative hand management card game where players need to agree together the actions they are taking. That does mean, like many cooperative games, Tembo can be susceptible to 'alpha player syndrome' where a dominant player effectively takes over the game and directs the other players to the extent that they are little more than pawns. There's some protection from this in the fact many of the cards are unidirectional and players aren't supposed to reveal their cards to each other before playing them.
Even at the easiest setting, it can be quite a challenge to succeed, especially if you are unlucky and hit a run of unfortunate card draws. Our plays at Board's Eye View have generally taken 45-60 minutes. The game incorporates various options for altering the difficulty level, including event tiles that have negative or positive effects. These help to add to Tembo's replayability. The rulebook also includes the option of playing as a campaign game (three games played at increasing difficulty levels) and rules for solitaire play.
