Under the Mango Tree
- Board's Eye View
- Jun 18
- 2 min read
Designed by Karl Lange, with art by Dennis Lohausen, Under the Mango Tree is a light family-friendly drafting and set collection game from Pegasus Spiele. It takes 2-4 players.
The two- or three-player game is played over five rounds with an initial starting hand of four cards in each round. In the four-player game, the initial hand size is five cards and there are some scoring variations but the game is played over just three rounds. Players are drafting a card from their hand and passing the others on, which is routine in a drafting game, but the distinguishing feature in this game is that the cards are domino-like in that each offers a choice of two different effects (ie: to which set collection scoring they'll contribute). When you select the card you want to take, you have to choose which half you are activating.
There are five different set collection locations on your individual player board and you must tuck the card you select into the relevant section where it will contribute to your end-game score. Some sections score potentially more than others: mangoes and lorikeets are each totalled and then multipled together; bees score for their total but with bonuses for having more than the players on either side of you; fish score an increasing amount for each different one in a set; animals in the animal reserve score for each species for which you have two or three examples - so there's a push-your-luck element here, as single animals score nothing. You'll take negative points if you don't put aside the requisite number of koala-shaped garbage bins, but again there's a push-your-luck element because you don't get any benefit from having garbage bins that don't quite meet the requirement: if you don't manage to get the four bins required in a two- or three-player game you'd have been better off not taking any.
Tho' Under the Mango Tree offers two choices for every card, the choices are straightforward enough to make this a game that's playable by quite young school-age children. It works at all player counts tho' it's notably less random as a two-player game as in this mode you can make your first drafting decision with the knowledge of what cards are likely to be available to you on the next but one turn.
