Players: 3-5
Time: 1.5-2 hours
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)

This game was simutaneously published in Germany by Ravensburger/Alea. Except the German version is called "Ice Age", and they actually put the Alea #8 on the spine of the box. (It's missing from the Rio Grande edition.)

The Components

As with most Alea games, the one comes with a ton of components that you stack on and around the board:

• 1 game board
• 12 glacier tiles
• 65 hunters
• 6 mammoths
• 14 campfire tiles
• 1 separator
• 55 cards
• 50 stones
• 6 clubs
• 1 rulebook

Game Board: A four-panel gameboard printed full-color on linen-textured cardboard. The board proper is colorful, yet pretty abstract. It shows a land divided into 12 different regions, labelled 1-12; there are 6 different types of regions (mountains, ice fields, etc) which are relevant only for certain placement cards. There's also a scoring track that runs along three edges of the board.

Glacier Tiles: These 12 medium-weight cardboard tiles, also labelled 1-12, each fit over a corresponding space on the board. They're nicely die cut so that they form weird shapes, yet fit together. Other than that, they're faily plain, each just showing show blue and white texture--and that number.

Wood Bits: There are 13 hunters each in the 5 player colors (red, green, yellow, blue, and black). These are just painted wooden cylinders. I was pretty excited to see something other than the abstract cubes used by many German games--until I plopped a handful on the table and they started rolling all over, bouncing on the floor, etc.

The wooden mammoths, on the other hand, are beautifully representational. They're all painted brown and have a somewhat complex cut that looks really good. They're probably the nicest wooden figures I've seen in a German game.

And the contrast between those abstract hunters and those representational mammoths is ... odd.

Campfire Tiles: These are circular cardboard tiles, each of which shows a campfire and a number between 0 and 2. They're good-looking and the all-important numbers are easy to pick out. Unfortunately, most of the game these tiles are sitting upside down on the board, and the backside shows an ugly mess of branches and snow. (I think.)

Separator: This irregular rectangular pieces of cardboard sits to the side of the gameboard, dividing a portion of the table into "light" and "dark" sides. It just has a brown gradient on it--nothing fancy. Some players thought it looked like a piece of bacon.

Cards: There are two decks of cards, the "light" cards and the "dark" cards, which are easily distinguishable thanks to to the different colorations on the card backs. The cards are normal card-size, printed on slightly flimsy cardstock, with rounded corners. Each card has a specific game effect which is both described and shown iconographically. In addition, a cost or value in stones is shown iconographically.

Overall, the cards were fairly intuitive, especially because the icons are very well done once you figure out how they're representing different types of moves. The only downside is that in a few cases the text is a little shorter than it should be, and it doesn't explain a precise limitation on movement; if you don't also look at the icons, you can get confused your first game through.

There are also two cards in the Rio Grande Games edition which are, quite unfortunately, misprinted. They're the "dark" Cult cards, which should have the identical text to the "light" Cult cards, not the mess that's printed on them.

Stones: The "money" in the game (associated with the cards) are basically irregular hexagonal pieces, printed with shades of gray. They're printed on sturdy cardboard.

Clubs: Another cardboard piecce: these show clubs.

Rulebook: Like other Alea games, the rules have running sidebars summarizing how to play for in-game reference, which is a wonderful innovation. There are also plenty of examples and illustrations as well as a nice card summary at the end. I did find the rules a little obtuse in a few places, particularly in one illustrative picture where hunters are laid out in a real weird manner for counting, but I was able to pick up the rules with little problem.

Box & Tray: The box is a standard Alea bookshelf size, though as already mentioned it's the first printing of an Alea game without a number on the spine. There's a decent tray inside, with spaces for the cards, the bits, and even those irregular glacier tiles.

Overall, I find many of the components in Mammoth Hunters pretty bland--lots of cardboard printed with muted colors, and those aforementioned cylindrical hunters. However, I find three elements standout: (1) the cards, particularly the icons used to show how the card works; (2) the sidebars and card summaries found in the rules; and (3) those darned cute wooden mammoths. Thus the game barely ekes in an above-average "4" out of "5" for Style.

The Game Play

Mammoth Hunters is at heart an area-control game, where you gain points through heavy investment of hunters in certain regions, particularly regions containing mammoths.

Setup: In games with less than 5 players, some regions will start out covered by glaciers: mammoths, hunters, and campfires may never be placed in or moved into glacier covered regions. Afterward one campfire is put face-down in each non-glaciated region. Then 4 mammoths are placed in certain regions of the board according to the number of players.

Next to the board a "dark" and a "light" play area are setup, each containing the appropriate deck of cards. Then between 20 and 30 stones are placed next to the dark cards, forming the "dark" supply. Clubs and extra mammoths are also placed next to the board.

Finally, the players take turns placing 6 hunters, 1 at a time, onto the board. Each hunter is placed in any (non-glaciated) region of the board, irrespective of what's there already.

Order of Play: The game is played in four rounds, each of which contains four phases:

1. Settling
2. Conflict
3. Scoring
4. Glaciation

Settling: This phase is actually the main core of the game. Starting with the first player, and going clockwise around the table, each player takes the following actions:

1. Must play a card
2. May discard a card
3. Draw to refill to five cards

Must Play a Card. You'll always have two types of cards in your hands, "light" cards and "dark" cards. Light cards are good, and benefit yourself; they cost stones to play. Dark cards conversely benefit other players, and you get stones for having played them.

Your first decision in each settling phase is thus whether to play a light card or a dark card. If you have 8 or more stones already, you must play light, while if you don't have enough stones to play any of your cards, you must play dark. Beyond those extremes, you'll get a to choose a card to play.

Light cards can have a variety of effects. They include:

• Place your hunters on the board.
• Move your hunters on the board.
• Move other hunters on the board.
• Swap any hunters.
• Place mammoths on the board.
• Move mammoths on the board.
• Move campfires on the board.
• Place clubs on the board.

When you play a dark card, you usually choose a player to play it on, and they get to decide how to apply the effects of the card. These inclued:

• All players place hunters on the board.
• Move hunters on the board.
• Remove hunters from the board.
• Remove mammoths from the board.
• Move campfires on the board.
• Place clubs on the board.

There's an important rule related to the dark card play especially: no negotiation is allowed, meaning you can't give dark cards to players if they promise to use them in certain ways.

May Discard a Card. If you don't like your cards, you can toss one out.

Draw to Refill to Five Cards. Finally you draw to bring your hand back up to five, with the caveat that you must always have at least one of each type of card.

Ending Settling. The settling round continues until all of the stones on the dark side of the table are taken through dark card use. At that point the player finishes his last action (except in the final round) and then settling ends.

Conflict: At this point you flip face-up all the campfires on the board. Through card play and subsequent campfire movement, some regions may have more than one. You now see how many people each region can support.

A region can support: 3 people + 1 per mammoth + a variable number per campfire (0-2).

If there are more people in a region than the support number, conflict occurs. Each player, one at a time, loses a hunter in the region, starting with the player with the least hunters in the region. Repeat until the hunter number drops below the support number. The conflict ends the instant you drop to the support number of below, even if players haven't lost an equal number of hunters (e.g., if a region were one hunter over, only the player with the lowliest set of hunters would lose a hunter; while if a region containing three different players were four over, each player would lose one hunter, than the lowliest player would lose a second).

There's one exception: a player with a club can't be conflicted out of existence.

When the conflict ends, all clubs from that region are removed back to the side of the board.

Scoring: Finally, each region is scored. Each player gets 1 point per Hunter surviving in a region if there are no mammoths, 2 if there is one mammoth, and 3 if there are two or more mammoths.

Glaciation: Except in the fourth round, the player in last place may now choose to place a glacier on any region that is either adjacent to the top of the board or adjacent to a region with a glacier on it. All of the hunters and mammoths in that region are removed.

The campfires are then reshuffled and placed back face-down on any non-glaciated regions on the board and a new round of play begins. All of the stones on the light side of the board are moved back to the dark side.

Ending the Game: As noted above the fourth round of the game is very slightly different (last dark card is not played, there is no glaciation). After the fourth round ends and is scored, the player with the most points wins the game.

How the Game Feels

Mammoth Hunters is a somewhat chaotic feeling game where you're trying to build up good regions on the board, with many of your hunters cohabitating with one or more mammoths, and where you have more hunters than other players. The strategic play of pieces onto the board is real and important.

There are some weird cooperative elements in the game too. You'll not allowed to make explicit deals, but you'll frequently be scanning the board to discover the best tactical play of a dark card. It's often possible to discover an opponent who most likely will make a play that will benefit you, and figuring that out's a lot of fun.

There are various ways to pull mammoths out from under hunters, and this can cause large swings in the score for various players. Thus one of the real goals in the game is to never look like you're too far ahead, else your opponents will turn on you and can possibly have a devastating affect on your scoring. This can be very frustrating in late rounds if you've managed to get ahead and are forced to struggle to maintain that lead.

Relationships to Other Games

Mammoth Hunters (2002) is fundamentally a per-capita area control game with a curiously cooperative method for action selection. As such it bears clear relationship to Moon & Weissblum's other area-control game, San Marco.

From my readings online, I'm aware I'm well in the minority, but I consider Mammoth Hunters a slightly better game. The action selection method (playing cards on other players, as opposed to splitting decks of cards for them) allows about as much control, yet has much less frustrating downtime. In addition, the mechanics which underlie the area control are more interesting (there's more moving of pieces around, as opposed to largely just placing or removing pieces). Both have rough edges, mostly related to chaotic actions which can have a large effect on the game (banishment in San Marco which can destroy a player's presence in a province, versus stealing away a mammoth in Mammoth Hunters), but again I think the chaos and randomness is better controlled in Mammoth Hunters. (San Marco does have one advantage missing from Mammoth Hunters: elegant in-game scoring which adds another level of strategy, but that's still not enough to offset the game for me.) If this is all Greek to you, go read my review of San Marco as it's an interesting contrast in similar game styles.

When speaking about area control games, you have to go back to the classic, El Grande (1995). The big difference between the two is that El Grande is majority control while Mammoth Hunters is per capita. I'm honestly not sure how much of a difference this makes in play, but in El Grande (and San Marco for that matter), just the top two or three players get points for a region, while in Mammoth Hunters each player gets a per capita amount of points based on how many hunters he has in a region--though players with fewer hunters might be removed beforehand through conflict.

I'll end this dicussion of similar games just by saying that Weissblum and Moon have come up with a lot of games in their collaborative career where players are forced to help out opponents. In Mammoth Hunter it was through card play, while in San Marco it was through splitting a set of cards into two or three piles. Another standout is Oasis (2004) where each player makes an offering of between one and three cards which other players may select.

The Game Design

Here's some of the good points in Mammoth Hunter's game design:

Interesting On-Board Strategy: Mammoth Hunters features something absent from some other majority-control games. The on-board strategy has some real depth. You can build up strong enclaves on board that will remain powerful, and at the same time have a variety of options to move hunters and mammoths around to modify values.

Interesting Card Strategy: The card play method also allows for some good strategy. In particular, the "dark" cards can be quite fun to play, as you try and judge which opponents will make which moves, and how those might benefit you. Much to my surprise, I often found myself feeling regret when I was forced to play a light card instead of a dark card, because I had great plans for my dark card usage.

Interesting Simulation: The game also has a kind of neat simulation aspect, showing mammoths moving from region to region, then the hunters following them en masse.

Here's a variety of troubles I had with the game. Only the "beat the leader syndrome" has the possibility of being a game breaker. The rest were what I call rough edges:

Beat the Leader Syndrome: I'll start with the biggest annoyance. It was very dangerous to be in a leading position because there were a lot of cards that could be used against you. Some balance of this sort is usually nice in a game, but I felt it was sufficiently overbalanced here that being in a leadership position seemed almost untenable.

High Chaos Value: Because it was fairly easy to move the mammoths around, you really couldn't depend on keeping a good board position for very long, really upping the chaos inherent in the game.

Some Kingmaking Possible: Toward the end of the game there are implicit kingmaking possibilities because you're playing cards to help or hurt other players. This was less of an issue than in, say, San Marco, where players explicitly determined scoring, but still a factor.

Clubs Fairly Irrelevent: The clubs seemed next to useless in the game. They just protected one hunter, meaning that they only came into effect in the unlikely situation where you got down to your last hunter--and their survival meant a measly 1-3 points for you.

No Negotiating Awkward: The "no negotiating" rule has the possibility to be awkward depending on just how pedantic the players in your group insist on being. After all, what constitutes negotiation? Agreement? Threats? Any talk? Non-pedantic players won't have any real issue here.

Overall, looking at Mammoth Hunters up against the similar San Marco, as I already said I liked Mammoth Hunters better. It felt like it was a bit more innovative and had more strategic depth, despite more rough edges, while San Marco seemed much more stolid and tried. I gave San Marco a "3" and if I could I'd give Mammoth Hunters a "3.5". Absent that I'll just say that mammoth Hunters earns a high "3" and is a good addition to the Moon/Weissblum game series.

Conclusion

As an area-control game Mammoth Hunters succeeds. It's interesting to play and has some nice strategic depth. It's perhaps not the best area-control game out there (my guess would be that's El Grande, which I have yet to play or review), but it's enjoyable and recommended if you generally like Moon and Weissblum's game play.

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