Continuing with the wallet games, yesterday I played three games of Food Chain Island which I also enjoyed. You start with a randomised 4x4 grid of the 16 animal cards, and each turn a ‘predator’ card eats an adjacent ‘prey’ card by moving on top of its space, and you then perform the unique ability on that predator’s card (which frequently involves additional card movements). The goal is to end up with only one card remaining. The catch is that every card acts as predator to only the three cards ranked immediately below it (9 can eat 8,7,6 only); so you’re trying to manoeuvre things so that you’ll have at least one adjacent predator/prey pairing every single turn, while also trying not to allow any breaks in the food chain to occur. I found it to be a neat little puzzle.
I might have gotten a bit lucky here as well, as I won all three games, successfully getting all the way down to a single card in the first two games (both times using both sea creatures on my final move – these are one-time special abilities), and scraping over the line with the minimal win condition of three cards in the third game. I’m not sure whether I accidentally cheated, mind – I later realised I’d misinterpreted a couple of cards, but I couldn’t remember whether or not that had benefited me. In any case you can make the base game harder by removing one or both of the sea creatures, if you need more of a challenge!
The Friendly Waters expansion looks like a fun way to mix up the sea creature abilities.
The Tough Skies expansion just looks nasty! – I don’t think I’ll be playing with that anytime soon – although with both of those expansions you could easily mix things up with extra sea creatures to counter the aerial terror.