Wild Serengeti Board Game Review
Long before I was reviewing board games I had the chance to play Wild Serengeti from Bad Comet Games. This game made me fall in love with animal themed games, and we even wrote about it in our top 5 animal themed game article a few years back. Wild Serengeti is definitely a bit longer than than I would like, but the turn to turn moments are really strong.
In Wild Serengeti, players are attempting to maneuver animals into positions on the Serengeti to complete wildlife pictures (cards), creating sets of icons, points, and nest resources to spend. Players will take actions that will allow them to move animals, take photos, and more, which is how you’ll manipulate the board so you can complete pictures.
Cards always have specific requirements, like certain animals adjacent to each other, animals on specific terrain, or animals in a specific orientation. You’ll spend money to take the resources, and once players can’t afford to take more turns, the round is over. There are things that happen when rounds end, like end game scoring cards, animals moving off the board, and more.
I like the idea behind this game, and for the most part it works really well. There is a bit of randomness though, and sometimes – although definitely not all the time! – the people who ended up winning, win because they “lucked” into a good combination in order to finish a card with minimal effort. On the flip side, you can’t really plan past your turn either, because as other players take their turns, the board will look WAY different by the time it is your turn again.
Despite the randomness, though, I find the overall turn to turn gameplay to be really engaging. It’s a good feeling when you can use your action to lineup the animals perfectly to score big points, or get some icons you need for big end game scoring. And using your meat tokens and special effect tokens at the right time to move animals and negate terrain requirements is not only thematic, but great strategic fun as well.
The game looks phenomenal when on the table, and it really goes ooze theme. Even without the deluxe resources, I think that Bad Comet has done an excellent job creating this game. The animals are a really nice size, and have screen printing on both sides. The cardboard tokens are also phenomenal quality; I think the deluxe wooden pieces would be a lot nicer, but definitely not a requirement in my opinion. The board is double sided, with different layouts of terrain on each side. It’s a nice way to change up a game that feels relatively similar each time you play it.
The only production downside is the size of the icons and writing on the cards. So much space is allotted for some of this writing, and I suppose they wanted to have a universal size across all cards. But when it’s just a single icon as you can see in the image above, I would have liked it to be bigger somehow!
Wild Serengeti has been out for quite a long time now, but our good friends at Bad Comet Games sent this over when they heard I didn’t have a copy and had never reviewed it. We have reviewed every game in the Bad Comet library, and they are one of our favourite publishers for a reason. Wild Serengeti is wildly enjoyable, although long. Like the rest of their games, we love this one too!
Article By Adam
