Rejuvenate the Amazon in Bad Comet Game’s next big hit!
Next week, Bad Comet Games is launching their next board game — Life of the Amazonia — on Kickstarter!
This game follows up on the success of their last project — Wild: Serengeti — with the same sort of cute animeeples and nature cards previous backers will be familiar with — from W.S.
Scan this QR code below to get an announcement when the project launches on crowdfunding.
In Life of the Amazonia, players will tackle an important environmental issue that affects the entire planet — the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest. Players will control a non-profit conservation society with plans to help rejuvenate parts of the rainforest that were previously cut/burnt down by people.
As native trees and flowers are reintroduced back into the Amazon players have the opportunity to release native species back into the wild to help their regrown jungle flourish once again.
This is a point salad-style game where most actions you take will lead to endgame points, but this game has little gameplay similarity to Bad Comet’s previous animeeple game other than the chance to obtain cards from a public market of face-up choices.
In fact, players who may have even been turned off by the interactive nature of Wild: Serengeti — where opponents could thwart your plans by moving the animals you need to different locations — in Amazonia players will be building up their own personal section of the Amazon Rainforest in a myriad of different ways.
Players can acquire jungle terrain tiles that extend their jungle and (potentially) create larger and larger habitats for their newly arriving flora & fauna. Players can also acquire trees to place in their forests and native flowers to place in their rivers, eventually adding animals to all of their habitats including the wetland hexes.
“It’s rare to see a board game that combines both bag-building and tile placement well. Life of the Amazonia does it smoothly. I could see LofA becoming a family favorite in many board game collections.”
How do players acquire these cute resources?
One of the main mechanisms in LotA is bag building. Players will start with low-value tokens for the resources currency, leaf, water, and fruit. As in most bag-building and deck-building games, it’s important to acquire more powerful tokens and replace weaker tokens as the game progresses. Currency tokens are used to buy other tokens as in larger currency tokens (similar to buying higher coin values in Dominion). Leaf tokens are used to acquire jungle terrain tiles, trees, and certain animals. Water tokens are used to increase your token storage capacity, acquire flowers for the river, acquire nature cards — good for instant bonuses or endgame VP, and certain animals. Fruit tokens are used to acquire all kinds of animals.
An interesting tension takes place with these resources. Currency is really valuable early as it is usually needed to upgrade ALL of the resource tokens that go into your bag, but later in the game, they will become less and less useful unless you take efforts to remove them from your deck. Fruit is very useless in the initial turns but will be what you want to pull from your bag more and more as the game progresses. Both leaves and water will be useful throughout the game — with water being wildly more powerful than any other resource (in my personal opinion).
On a player’s turn, they may take as many actions as they can afford, in any order that they choose. Used tokens and purchased tokens will be placed in a player’s discard area which is a cute cardboard boat that can dump all of the tokens into their bag when required. If players consider their actions during other players’ turns this game also plays smoothly. If players are staring at their mobile phones or daydreaming when it’s not their turn, then this game can drag.
Types of Actions
- Purchase Resource Tokens (Currency, leaf, water, and fruit)
- Area Restoration (Take terrain tiles by advancing on the Waterfall of Life track)
- Place Animals (by paying the costs shown on the animal cards in the Animal Refuge card market)
- Place Trees/Place Flowers (by advancing on the Waterfall of Life tracks)
- Obtain Nature Cards (take these cards from the Nature Card market)
- Expand Storage (by advancing on the Waterfall of Life track)
- Purchase Bonus Actions (by paying the cost stated on the side of the Waterfall of Life)
Players will also obtain many one-time bonuses over the course of the game. For example, trashing a resource token they no longer want to draw from their bag, placing a special terrain tile that can change the habitat type (forest, river, or wetlands) of one specific hex, drawing an extra random resource from their bag, or gaining a Seed resource token that acts as a one-time “wild” resource they can spend as any of the main resources in the game.
The game end is triggered when 5 of the 8 base game animal cards have had all of their animeeples removed from the Refuge Market and moved out onto players’ jungle terrain tiles. So, there is a racing element to this game, where the player who removes the final animal and placed the last completion token will gain extra VP — similar to the condition of emptying your hand in Anno 1800.
How to play Life of the Amazonia well
In the current iteration, there are 8 base game animals each with 4 card faces (A, B, C, & D) that all add different complexity levels to how the animals score points. The animal scoring tends to be based on what other animals are adjacent to others, how many animals are in the same continuous habitat, and how large that continuous habitat is. Some strategies will rely on players loading up on animals that all like more trees in the jungle, others based on flowers, and others based on animal types like mammals, reptiles/amphibians, or birds.
Gaining an advantageous Nature Card before your opponents is an important part of LotA. The good ones won't stay available for very long!
Advancing on the Waterfall of Life will also lead to good scoring opportunities for players.
Details about the Game
Life of the Amazonia is a game for 1–4 players.
The Solo Mode has a Challenge Mode with Automa gameplay elements and promises a Solo Campaign Mode that is currently a work in progress. There will be options to add-on deluxe wooden tokens, extra animeeples, and a wooden Waterfall of Life (among other add-on offerings).
This game will be available on Kickstarter and you can follow the campaign by scanning the QR code below.
What I like most about Life of the Amazonia
- Like many, I’m a sucker for the cute animeeples and the attractive art and nature theme.
- This game fits in a nice play space for most game collections. It’s a pretty quick teach and players can jump in right away without feeling overwhelmed despite having many options (as the game progresses).
- The game has the feeling of moving at a really good pace (if your playgroup isn’t zoning out). Only the turns near the end of the game will slow down as players seek to calculate what they have time to do with their remaining resources.
- It isn’t easy to see which player is ahead at a glance unless someone is completely dominating the others. Early on, it might appear one player is ahead while the others load up on powerful resource tokens before storming ahead in later turns.
- I love games with a positive message about saving our planet and aren’t always based on greed and making money. In this game, money means nothing unless you can use it to improve the Amazon Rainforest.
- There are multiple paths to victory. Fly up the Waterfall of Life tracks, specialize in a couple of animals that really maximize your strategy, diversify your animals (especially if your Nature Cards reward you for different animal types), carefully acquire the most impactful Nature Cards, and race to finish the game before your opponents have too many chances to draw their more powerful resource tokens, take animals that your animals really want to place in their jungle (this goes for acquiring and discarding Nature Cards from the card market that your opponents really want!).
- This is being offered by Bad Comet Games who ran a very smooth Kickstarter campaign for Wild: Serengeti that had lots of positive fan interaction and let the backers shape MUCH of the way the game was made in its final version. They also delivered almost two months EARLY in the middle of the COVID-19 supply chain crisis.
What you might not enjoy about LofA
Some of the components (like the Waterfall of Life and the cardboard boats might have durability issues. There are currently far fewer animals than in Wild: Serengeti meaning the variety might get stale even though they have so many different scoring conditions. The small cardboard resource tokens may have issues randomizing in the soft cloth bags leading to players being able to redraw(cheat) the tokens they placed in the bag last. The water resource feels under-costed and overutilized in LofA meaning players can mainly focus on acquiring water resources. If your playgroup isn’t engaged with the game and waits till it is their turn to figure everything out the game becomes much less enjoyable and leads to uncomfortable downtimes.
I plan on backing whatever deluxe version of Life of the Amazonia goes on offer as I’ve had good luck with their first game Wild: Serengeti with my local playgroup and I trust Bad Comet Games based on a really great experience with their previous crowdfunding project and ability to deliver EARLY at a time where all of my other backed projects were 6 months to a year+ LATE.
I got a chance to test (extensively) an early prototype of Life of the Amazonia and the opinions above — both positive and negative — are mine and mine alone.
Let me know if you have any questions about this game as I’ve gotten to teach it and play it quite a bit and it’s still fresh in my mind.
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Until next time, I’m preparing an article for the upcoming euro from Fantasia Games — Unconscious Mind!
