Animal Kingdom is the second expansion released for the hugely successful tableau builder EARTH. This new addition to the game introduces as the name suggests creatures from the Animal Kingdom. These animals bring in new ways to score points and activate at specific points in the game.

For a review of the EARTH main game, and the first expansion, ABUNDANCE please see my earlier reviews on these.

Disclaimer: The publisher provided the prototype copy of Earth: Animal Kingdom Expansion. The opinions expressed in the review are completely my own.

Review:

Rules & Setup:

The set up of the game depends on if you are also using the ABUNDANCE expansion as well, but only the base game is actually required to play either the new expansion, or both together.

For this new expansion there are only a few extra bits to do during set up, and at most you’re looking at between 5 & 10 minutes.

The rules for the introduction of the new animals are the usual clear and concise rules you’ve come to expect from EARTH and its designer, and once again extremely good pictures and explanations are ‘abundant’ (pun intended ☺) throughout the rulebook I downloaded. You draft animal cards by being dealt the required amount, namely 4, selecting one and passing the others to the next player. You keep doing this until you have 4 put aside and from those 4 you keep 1 or 2 depending on the difficulty level of the game you have decided to play. You then place your chosen card(s) into your own playing area and then seek out and put the corresponding ani-meeples onto its relevant card.

Each of these cards will have a specific and special ‘action’ on it which is triggered when you as a player use one of your leaf tokens, and only you activate not your opponents. 

Another animal card is also revealed and is placed in the centre of the table with its ‘global’ side face up, and this card is triggered at the end of each round. Again each of the animal cards have global abilities, and every player can use this ability if they meet the requirements printed on the card.

The animeeples have conditions that require them to either stay on their card, or are moved from their starting card into your tableau the first time you use a leaf.

Movement is optional, but is often required for the ability to take effect.

Movement will always follow one of these rules;-

• Move up to
• Move to
• Move exactly

Your animeeple cannot back track, move through or end its movement on a card it previously occupied earlier in its activation, including the card it started on at the beginning of the activation. They can however move back to a card previously occupied in a future activation.

Empty spaces in your tableau can restrict movement of the animeeple, but it depends on the movement conditions on its card.

Any resources produced by the animeeple action are typically added to the players tableau, but some actions might mean that sprouts are removed from tableau cards and placed onto the animeeples own card and thereby gaining VP’s  at the end of the game.

Any animeeples not used by players are simply returned to the box as they won’t be needed in the game

The solo mode has the exact same setup as the multi player game and the rules are pretty much exactly the same, apart from any leaves that are discarded / converted to activate your animal are placed on Gaia’s solo board scoring her 5pts at the end of the game for each one placed in this way. Gaia activates her own animal(s) whenever she places a leaf on the fauna board, but since she has no tableau in play she ignores all animal placement and movement requirements, as well as card features and adjacency requirements for gaining resources. She must use any ability she can afford, and if she can pay the full cost of an ability she resolves it and gains the appropriate benefit(s).

If Gaia is ever instructed to draw cards as part of / due to the effects of an animal ability she will instead compost cards.

The gameplay of the new expansion fits seamlessly into either the base game on its own, and with the previous expansion, ABUNDANCE.

Because the new animeeples and their abilities are triggered only a potential set amount of times during a game, they are not overly intrusive into the original gameplay and when they do trigger you have to meet the requirements on their card to be able to perform whatever their ability is, which sometimes means you will need to have ‘planted’ certain cards into your  tableau on previous turns so your animeeple can be placed onto it when they are triggered by using / placing one of your leaf tokens.

These new abilities really do feel flavoursome given the nature of the game, and like the previous expansion, I think that any future games will only benefit from the inclusion of this new expansion once you have played a few games of just the base EARTH game itself.

After solo play I can’t see any reason not to include this new expansion into your games of EARTH, and I couldn’t find any negatives in the way it slots into the main game. I lost my first game 138 pts to 133 pts but thoroughly enjoyed it. 

I look forward to getting into the table as a multi player.

If you’re already an EARTH fan then this is going to be another addition that you are going to want to check out, and it really does look like it’s going to be another winner for Inside Up Games.

For me EARTH is one of the best games released in recent years, and our group always enjoys it when played, and Animal Kingdom is without doubt a worthy addition to the fold.

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