A Wild Venture
- Board's Eye View
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
A Wild Venture is a beautifully presented two-player tableau-building game from PIKA. It's designed by Iain Everett with charming art from Pennie Jo Everett.
Players will be moving their cute animal meeples along their choice of path on a map in order to collect coins and cards but tho' you're notionally venturing out on a map, the game is really all about the cards you play and add to your individual tableau. Players each start with basic cards that give them coins, movement on the board, or more cards, and the cards can be upgraded during the course of play. Each turn you take two actions. You ordinarily need to pay the cost indicated on a card in order to add it to your tableau but, depending on the type of card, you get to place tokens on it that are removed when the card is used. When the tokens on a card have been exhausted, that card is removed from your tableau and gets tucked into your scoring pile where it will score at the end of the game (when the draw deck is exhausted).
That's the game in a nutshell. You can benefit from triggering each other's equipment cards but there isn't otherwise much player interaction, so this is a game where players can each concentrate on optimising their tableaus and establishing their own mini engines without worrying overly about an opponent throwing a spanner in the works. End-game scoring is mainly for sets of tucked-away animal family cards and mainly involves multiplying the number of cards in your largest set by the number in your smallest set. There are points too for tokens on buildings and for equipment cards, the latter involving multiplying the number of cards by the number of buildings with 'enchantment' tokens on them (those collected from your adventuring on the board).
A Wild Venture is easy to learn and play. Our plays at Board's Eye View have all come in at around 50-60 minutes. Title notwithstanding it's really not a 'wild' game but we'd venture to suggest that you'll find it proves to be a delight to play.