Build biomes and populate them with flora and fauna to rewind a damaged landscape.
What Is Rewild: South America?
Rewild: South America is a tile-laying, tableau-building game for 1 to 4 players, ages 10 and up, and takes about 45–60 minutes to play. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge level of 60 Swiss Francs (about $73USD) for a copy of the game. It involves building out a landscape, and then finding synergies between the various plants and animals that can be placed on the landscape.
Rewild: South America was designed by Bruno Liguori Sia and published by Treeceratops, with illustrations by Keen Art, Joey Pool, and Johanna Tarkela.
New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer.
Rewild: South America Components
Note: My review is based on a prototype copy, so it is subject to change and may not reflect final component quality.
Here’s what comes in the box:
- Score board
- 4 Player boards
- 75 Biome tiles (shrublands, shrubland extensions, grasslands, rainforests)
- 55 Wildlife cards
- 26 Predation cards
- 28 Plant cards
- 28 Player Action cards
- 25 Expert Mode cards
- 4 Overview cards
- 11 Branch Animal meeples
- 18 Expert Mode Animal meeples
- 16 Player markers (4 per player)
- Start Player meeple
- 95 Animal markers (paw prints)
- 35 Minerals
- 35 Water
- 35 Seeds
One of the first things about Rewild that caught my eye was the illustration style: the animals are done in a cartoon style with sharp outlines, set against backgrounds that have a softer look, giving it a Studio Ghibli vibe. With the recent proliferation of AI-generated images and videos using a similar style, I’m pleased to note that Treeceratops did not use any AI imagery in this game—these images are made by actual people. The illustrations of the various insects and animals that you’ll be able to attract to your landscape are all beautifully illustrated, and the style helps the creatures really stand out on the cards.
There are several animal categories in the animal and predation decks, each with its own icon: insect, herbivore (small, medium, and large), predators, and apex predators—all but the insects are represented by an animal face icon. My only complaint with the icons is that the small herbivore icon and the predator icon are a similar size and profile, so it can be easy to mix them up at a glance.
Treeceratops is a Swiss company with a focus on sustainability, and as such aims to limit the amount of plastic they use, and they also rely on FSC-certified or recycled materials when possible. The wooden tokens in the game come in paper envelopes rather than plastic bags, and all of the game components are cardboard, paper, and wood.
The scoreboard is a large board that includes a scoring track around the outside edge, and then has clearly marked spaces for the three types of cards. My only complaint is that because you’re constantly taking cards from the board, and then sliding cards to the right to refill, it can be quite easy to bump the scoring tokens out of place.
The player boards are square, filled with hexes, some with additional icons in them. Along the right side of the board there are some icons indicating the three biomes where you will place cards, as well as a reminder for what’s needed to complete a biome. There’s a regular side and an advanced side—they’re mostly the same except for the completed biome bonus.
There’s a variety of animal meeples, and it’s a shame that the bulk of them are only used in the advanced game, because they’re very cool. I suppose it’s an incentive to play the game enough to move to the advanced mode!
The meeples that are used in every game are the ones sitting on (or hanging from) branches. These have a small rectangular base, which slots into the top of the 3D cardboard trees. It’s a clever design, and it’s a lot of fun when you manage to make that happen during the game.
How to Play Rewild: South America
You can download a copy of the rulebook here.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to score the most points by building out your landscape and filling it with plants and animals.
Setup
Give each player a player board, four player markers, and 7 action cards of their player color. Place one player marker Everyone also starts with 4 minerals, 4 water, and 1 seed. The player who most recently saw a wild animal takes the start player token.
Set up the main board: shuffle each of the card decks separately, and place them on their indicated spaces, and then reveal cards to form the market (5 animals, 3 predation cards, and 3 plants). Place the rest of the components—animal markers, landscape tiles, trees, resources, and animal meeples—nearby as a supply.
Gameplay
On your turn, you must play an action card from your hand and use its effect; each card has 2 options except for the harvest card. Once you’ve played your action, you leave the card in front of you, turned so that the action you took is at the top—the landscape icons above the actions may be used for various effects during the game.
Six of the cards have an option to add a specific landscape tile to your board, which costs minerals and water. Some of the hex spaces on your board show minerals or water—these are discounts for tiles placed on those locations. In addition, each shrubland provides a 1-mineral discount for tiles placed adjacent to it, and each grassland provides a 1-water discount. (Grasslands can be upgraded to wetlands, which provide a 2-water discount.) If you place a landscape tile on a star icon, you score points immediately, with rainforests scoring the most points and shrublands scoring the fewest.
There are also actions that allow you to gain minerals, water, or seeds—each of these also discards a specific card from the market. Finally, there are actions that upgrade landscapes: Shrublands can be expanded by adding a single hex shrubland, grasslands are flipped over to the wetlands side, and rainforests gain a tree. (Each landscape can only be upgraded once.)
The harvest card gives you 1 water, plus a number of seeds based on the landscape tiles on your board. Finally, it allows you to take all of your action cards back (including itself).
After playing and resolving your action card, if it was not the harvest card, you may then attract a number of cards from the score board: up to 5 wildlife card, 1 predation card, and 1 plant card.
Wildlife cards have an icon showing which landscape types the animal can live on, and how many hexes they occupy. If you have sufficient space in one of the terrain types, you may take the card and place it to the right of your board in the corresponding biome, and then place animal markers (the paw prints) in the hexes. Each hex on your board can only have one animal marker in it. Some animals can live in rainforests or trees—if so, then you find the matching meeple and use that instead. If you already have a tree, or if you upgrade the rainforest tile later to add a tree, then you can put the meeple into the tree, which frees up the rainforest ground space for another animal and also scores you 4 points.
Predation cards also have icons showing which biome they belong to, but they also need specific types of prey in that biome. When played, you place the predation card on top of the prey animal, and score points immediately. (Note that this does not remove the animal markers from the board.)
Plant cards have a seed cost and show which biome they belong to—just pay the cost and place the card to the right of your board in that biome.
Many cards have either a lightning bolt effect or an hourglass effect. Lightning bolt effects are immediate—usually scoring, but sometimes gaining resources. Hourglass effects are end-of-game scoring effects. If a card gets covered by a predation card, then it loses its effects and is mostly ignored except for effects that specifically refer to eaten animals.
You can complete a biome if it has at least one plant, one insect, one herbivore (any size), and one predator (either size). These count even if they have been eaten. The completed biome scores 6 points, and then you mark the completion bonus on your board with a player marker as a reminder that you’ve already scored it.
Game End
The game end is triggered if any of the following happens:
- A player has 8 visible (not eaten) animal cards showing
- A player has completely filled their board with landscape tiles
- The last wildlife card has been placed on the board.
When this happens, complete the current round, and then play one more full round.
All players then score any of their visible end-of-game scoring effects. The player with the highest score wins, with ties going to the player with the most completed biomes, and then the highest sum of rainforest tiles plus trees.
Game Variants
The solo game is run like a 2-player game, with an automated player. The automated player uses a set of action cards and a sort of flowchart that determines where it places tiles, which animals it will try to attract, and so on. Since it’s a simplified bot that doesn’t really have a way to react to what you’re doing, it gets a score handicap of 1.5x (or 2x if you’re playing on hard mode).
The advanced game introduces the rest of the animal meeples and some new wildlife cards that get shuffled into their corresponding decks. The advanced animals have, in addition to the regular icons indicating the required landscape, an additional icon showing a particular terrain layout. If you can build that particular layout on your board, then you get the advanced animal meeple and bonus points.
Why You Should Play Rewild: South America
Rewild: South America combines the tile-laying and a card tableau in an interesting way. The bulk of your points come from the cards—most of the animals offer either immediate scoring or end-game scoring, and a few of the plants also score points. But in order to play those cards, you’ll need to build out the tiles on your board to create the space for them, and that creates a different sort of puzzle about using the hex spaces efficiently, particularly taking advantage of the bonus icons. I like the way that it feels like you’re building an ecosystem layer by layer. First it’s the landscape itself: shrublands, grasslands, or rainforest. Then, once you have enough space, it attracts insects and herbivores, which in turn can attract carnivores.
Since the game ends when you have 8 animals showing (or 9 in the advanced game), you can’t just expand indiscriminately if you want a good score. I’ve sometimes taken the first animal that fits in a landscape spot, but then covered it later with a carnivore. If that first animal had an end-game score on it, I’ve just forfeited those points—better to take an animal with an immediate scoring bonus if you’re planning to eat it later, because then you’ve already gotten the points. If you’re not attracting predators, then you have a limited number of available spaces to place cards before the game ends, so you really want good combinations.
There’s a wide variety of end-game scoring conditions: you might score points for each medium-sized herbivore, or each tree, or each insect. There are also many animals that will give you points for landscape icons, which appear on the landscape tiles, on certain plant cards, and even on your action cards. For those, the timing of your action cards becomes important. For instance, if you’ll score 1 point per shrubland icon, then not only do you want to maximize your shrublands (perhaps by upgrading them), you could get as many as 6 more shrubland icons from your action cards, but only if you take the correct actions and the cards are still out when the game ends. If you play them too early, you might end up taking a harvest action and putting them back in your hand. Wait too late, and the game might end before you’ve played them again.
I mentioned the puzzle of building out your landscape tiles. There are bonus spaces on the board that can reduce the mineral or water cost of a tile, so you can use those to get some things built out quickly without having to spend actions to collect resources—for instance, you could use the 2-mineral discount to build a rainforest, since those provide more seeds when you harvest. However, there are only so many of the discount spaces, and rainforests do not provide resources for neighboring tiles. Shrublands and grasslands provide minerals and water, so if you build those up first, you can set up spaces that will be cheaper to build in the future. Having a good idea of how you want to lay things out will help you ensure that you’ll have the right amount of space to play everything you need.
Some of the spaces on your board have stars, which give points when you play a landscape tile on them, but you get more points for placing a rainforest than shrubland. The first time I played, I avoided building on them, thinking that I’d get around to placing forests on each one to maximize my score … but then ran out of time and ended up with several of them left empty by the end of the game. It’s a tricky balance, deciding when it’s time to cash in on the bonus points and when you can wait a little longer to build up to a rainforest.
While there isn’t any direct player interaction—you can’t do anything to somebody else’s board or tableau—you can try to scoop up plants or wildlife that are particularly advantageous to your opponents. For instance, in one game where I had a carnivore-heavy tableau, my opponent snagged the vulture, which awards points for each eaten animal. It wasn’t worth as many points to him, but preventing me from getting it probably won him the game. Your action cards that claim resources also discard cards from the market; it’s the rightmost card, so you don’t get to choose just any card, but at the right time you could use it to dump a card before somebody else gets it.
Rewild: South America has bits and pieces that remind me of some other games, but as a whole it’s a new experience. You’re managing both your action economy and your resources, and you’re looking for things that will round out each of your biomes. I like both the board-based puzzle of the landscapes and the combo-building puzzle of the wildlife cards. And it doesn’t hurt that the illustrations are so eye-catching!
For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Rewild: South America Kickstarter page!
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Disclosure: GeekDad received a prototype of this game for review purposes.
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