Preview: Weavlings in the Wilds

You are Fate Weaver Zadarra's trusty Weavling Trapper and it is up to you to bring back the Fate Weavlings from the Tender Wilds by luring them with the promise of meat. See the Fate weavlings were getting pudgy and were forced on to a diet by Fate Weaver Zadarra. This forced the Fate Weavlings to seek out the meat that was cut out of their diet in the Tender Wilds and its not safe for them out there. Weavlings in the Wilds is an upcoming game by Johnathan Flike published by Atomic Automation and hitting Kickstarter on Tuesday August 30th.

Weavlings in the Wilds is a beautiful single player game that presents itself as a simple puzzle game and has a lot of depth in decision making.

Weavlings in the Wilds is a card game that consists of 6 types of cards that will be laid out on the table in a 4x3 grid. There is a Trapper card this is the card you will move around the grid to take all of your actions like move, collecting traps, and using traps. There are the Trap cards that you will be using to manipulate the play grid. There are event cards that trigger an immediate effect. There are Weavling cards and these are your route to wining the game. You will lure them by paying their meat cost and adding the card to your population. Get 10 population and you win. The Beastie cards are the cards that are going both help and prevent you from getting a win. Beasties are your source of meat and also will eat the Weavlings if they are near by. Finally there are the Wild Spirit Cards, these cards will offer you a boon during the game and are played with a free action.

Weavlings in the Wilds has 4 phases per turn, the Trapper phase, the lure Weavlings phase, the Beasties Feed phase and the Travel phase. The trapper phase is your turn, this is when you take your three actions of moving around the grid, collecting traps and using traps.

Make sure that you manage the Weavlings close to or in the bottom row.

The Lure Weavlings phase is when you spend meat that you have collected from the traps in the Trapper phase to Lure the Weavlings back home. You meet the meat cost on the Weavlings card and then add the Weavling to the Lured Population pile. Make sure that you manage the Weavlings close to or in the bottom row. During the Travel phase the bottom row gets pulled off the board.

...there are less and less cards in the deck making the game harder and harder.

The Beasties Feed phase happens right after the Lure Weavlings phase and this is when the Beasties chomp the Weavlings in the grid. The Beasties go in order of their speed rating and will chomp on the Weavlings that are adjacent in the direction of the chomp icons on the Beastie card. The last phase of the game turn is the Travel phase and this has the bottom row of the grid being removed from play. Cards will be discarded (Wilds Spirits), Banished (Traps), Removed from the game (Weavlings) or become wounds (Beasties). This is what accelerates the game. Once you have run out of cards in the deck then you will reshuffle the discard pile to make the new draw deck but as the travel phases pull 4 cards off at a time and as you lure weavlings there are less and less cards in the deck making the game harder and harder.

The Weavlings will loose happiness each time you shuffle the deck. You will have to pay 1 meat for each unhappy Weavling to keep them in the lured population. When you get to 10 lured population you have won the game. There is also a few ways to lose the game. If you loose 10 Weavlings, take 10 wounds or run out of traps you will lose the game. This puzzler gets harder as you go through the game.

There are a couple of expansions that add to the replay value of Weavlings in the Wilds. Zadarra's Baubles and Brews a 12 card expansion adds 6 new traps to the game that you can fully swap out the base traps or mix and match them. Star Touched Predators a 21 card expansion adds 2 new Beasties, and new event cards. There is also an upgraded chomp mechanic for the Beasties called Devour. The two new beasties also come with some new abilities. I really recomend playing a couple of times before you add in the new beasties.

Weavlings in the Wilds is a great puzzle solo game with lots of replay. The game is not super easy (which is a good thing) and it offers a lot of fun especially when you lose as you will want to play it again and again to get that win. The expasions also add in a ton of fun replay value. Be sure to check out Weavlings in the Wilds on Kickstarter.

Players: 1

Year Published: 2022

Recommended Ages: 13+

Time to Play: 20 minutes

A preview copy of Weavlings in the Wilds was provided to Bert's Tabletop Games by Atomic Automaton for review purposes.