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Valley of the Mammoths is a prehistoric wargame by Bruno Faidutti.
Players: 3-6
Playing Time: 2-3 hours
Difficulty: 8 (of 10)
The Components
Valley of the Mammoths comes with:
- 1 board
- 1 wooden season marker
- 2 dice
- Cardboard Chits:
- 62 animal tokens
- 98 tribe tokens
- 30 tribal camp markers
- 9 crop markers
- 6 fire markers
- 2 fence markers
- 9 wildfire/flood markers
- 42 food markers
- 70 cards
- 1 cloth sack
Gameboard: Two 2-panel gameboards each printed double-sided. This cleverly allows for four different gameboards, depending on which side you use of each half. The resulting board is a little more fragile than a one-piece affair, but only notably so if your players are clumsy.
The board is well illustrated and brightly colored. Various territories on the board are marked with numbers which allows for their simple randomization.
Wooden Season Marker: A black wooden disc, used to mark the current turn.
Dice: Two wooden dice, which are put to very good use in the game, since you can randomly select terrains or directions, thanks to that numbering on the gameboard.
Tokens: A slew of small cardboard chits. The chits are all linen-textured and many feature comical artwork.
Each player gets 10 warriors, 6 women, and 5 camps in his player color (red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, or blue-green).
There are also 62 animal tokens, divided between 6 types (wolves, sabretooth tigers, bears, bisons, wolly rhinos, and mammoths). Each animal has a number of different characteristics (movement speed, movement limitations, crop trampling ability, and food value). Unfortunately none of these are noted on the chits. There is some method to the madness of which numbers are associated with which types, but by the end of our game we were still having to look up some elements. This info really should have been printed on the animal chits or on the gameboard. Each animal also shows a colored letter on the back which marks where it enters the board (another bit of well-done randomization).
The food markers form a bank, with 1, 2, and 5 values, all clearly marked.
The crop markers are double-sided, to show healthy crops on one side and damaged crops on the other.
The wildfire and flood markers are simple triangles which are placed on the board in response to event cards. They're not very attractive, but they stand out.
Cloth Sacks: A black cloth sack used for drawing animals from a bag.
Cards: Three decks of cards: 40 fate cards, 15 summer event cards, and 15 winter event cards. They're all printed on light-to-medium weight cardstock, and they show more of tthe attractive, comical artwork featured on the counters. There's quite a bit of unique art in this game, which is nice.
The cards have a ton of text each on them. It's generally enough to figure out what they do, though in one or two cases I wished for a glossary of cards with more explanations.
Overall the components in Valley of the Mammoths are of average to good quality and attractively produced. Unfortunately there's hasn't been a lot of work done on component utility, and that comes off the worse on the animal tokens, but that's my only real concern with the Style of the game. As such I've given it a solid "4" out of "5" for Style: quite nice!
Warning: some of the artwork features cartoon nudity.
The Gameplay
The object of Valley of the Mammoths is to found four camps, and crush your opponents while trying, if need be.
Setup: The board is laid out in one of its four configurations. Ecah player takes their set of 10 warriors, 6 females, and 5 camps. In addition each player starts off with 12 food markers.
Starting with the first player, each player places a camp, 2 females, and 5 warriors in a space on the board. If they place it on a plains, they can put down some crops too.
Each player is also given 5 fate cards. These cards do various random, and powerful things, like letting women fight, killing enemies, and allowing you to boat across rivers.
The game starts in the second turn of summer. (There are three turns of summer and three turns of winter, and the game alternates between them.)
Order of Play: Over a turn, the players take part in 10(!) phases (though the last few phases only happen infrequently. They are:
- Events
- Arrival of New Animals
- Movement of Animals
- Movement of Tribes & Setup of Camps
- Combat
- Survival
- Births (end of season only)
- Planting Crops (end of winter only)
- Draw new Fate Cards (end of season only)
- End of the Turn
Events: Each turn (except the first two turns) one event card is drawn. There are separate decks for summer and winter, and a card is drawn from the appropriate deck. These provide various interesting happenings, usually to the cavemen's deficit, including long winters, volcanic eruptions, fire, floods, wolf attacks, storms, etc.
(Being a caveman is apparently hard!)
Arrival of New Animals:: A numberof new animals are drawn from the bag: 3-4 in summer and 1-2 in winter. Each of these is marked with a letter on the back, which denotes an edge hex where the animal is placed upon arrival.
There are six types of animals. They're each worth food, from 1-6 food value. Some can travel through mountains, while other can't. Bears can cross rivers, while others can't. The three heavier animals (bisons, wooly rhino, and mammoths) trample crops.
Movement of Animals: Now the animals move. Direction is determined based on a die roll. All the animals move 1-3 spaces in the appropriate direction (or in the opposite direction if they're immediately blocked in the selected direction). They stop when arriving in a space with other animals of their type or when arriving in a space with humans.
Animals moving over crops damage it the first time, then destroy it the second.
Movement of Tribes: Now the tribes move, in order, starting with the first player.
Each tribesman can move 1-2 spaces, but must stop when arriving in mountains. They also can't leave a space with animals or with other tribes, unless they leave behind a number of tribesmen equal to the number of enemies.
If a man and a woman of the same tribe are in the same space, free of enemies and without a camp, and they don't move, they can set up a camp instead of moving. This is generally a good thing, as you need camps to win.
Combat: Now any tribesmen in the same space as animals or enemy tribesmen must fight.
Inter-tribe combat happens first. Each player involved throws a six-sided die, adding bonuses for number of warriors and for being in a friendly camp. Women don't fight. The player(s) who don't have the highest numbers each lose a tribesman. This continues until there is only one tribe left in the hex.
If one player defeats all his opponents in a space with enemy women and/or a camp, he can take them, replacing the chits with his own-colored markers.
Now combat with any animals occurs, following the same procedure. Women can fight here; they don't give bonuses, but can be taken as casualties. If animals are defeated they provide food for the victor, 1-6 points depending on the size of the animal.
Survival: Now each tribe must see if they can feed themselves. Each tribe gains one food for each hex which contains at least one tribesman and is adjacent to water (either season) or a forest (summer only). Coveted river/forest spaces indeed produce two food.
At the end of summer crops can also be harvesting producing 4 or 8 food, depending on if the crops were damaged.
In turn each tribesman consumes one food.
The difference goes into or out of a player's food supplies, and if he's can't feed everyone, tribesmen must die.
Birth: At the end of each season, camps with women produce babies. A die is rolled to determine the sex of each. Most are warriors.
Planting Crops: At the of winter a player may plant a crop in each camp space on plains, at the cost of 1 food.
Draw New Fate Cards: At the end of each season a player may draw a fate card if he has less than 5.
End of the Turn: At the end of a turn a player must announce if he has 4 or more camps. If he still does at the next end of turn he wins the game.
The animals can also win, if all the humans are wiped out.
Relationships to Other Games
Bruno Faidutti is well-known for his quirky and somewhat chaotic German-style games. Valley of the Mammoths isn't anything like those. It's one of his earliest designs, first published in 1989, well before the German game craze hit the rest of Europe. As a result, Valley of the Mammoths feels almost totally different than anything else Bruno has published (or at least different than anything else still in print).
Valley of the Mammoths is essentially a simulationistic wargame with chaotic elements. It's most reminescent of other quirky wargames, such as Atlas' Cults Across America.
The Game Design
To a certain extent I feel like Valley of the Mammoth's time has come and gone. I know people who enjoy it and regularly play it, but simulationistic wargames of this sort aren't being made any more. Most new ones are either deadly serious (and thus more complex) or are tending toward European ideals (like Vinci and other European wargames did).
At core the mechanics of Valley of the Mammoths are pretty simple, the combat particularly so. You roll a die, you add a few modifiers, that's it. It's easy.
The simulation, meanwhile, is very nicely crafted. The idea of winter versus summer events, the struggle for food, and the migration of the animals are all well-designed and add a lot of color to the game.
However, Valley of the Mammoths is also a very random game. I talked in the components section about how well done the random elements are, and they are from a component design standpoint. From a gameplay design standpoint, on the other hand, they have massive effects on the results. Events can badly hurt singular players. The fate cards can be hugely powerful if you draw something helpful and play it right. The animal appearances and migrations can foil the best-laid plans, and the die rolls for the combats have high variance which can resulted in an unexpected loss.
Overall, Valley of the Mammoths doesn't really feel to me like a game that you can play to win. Instead you have to play it to experience it. Taken in that mindset, the color works beautifully and the randomness will just represent the foibles of life.
On the whole I've given it a "3" out of "5" for Substance, with the comment that it'll probably appeal considerably more to someone brought up on American wargames (because it is a nice design) and considerably less to European game players.
Conclusion
Valley of the Mammoths is a Bruno Faidutti wargame from before the German game invasion. It's complex and simulationistic, as you'd expect from the genre, and it has a huge amount of chaos and randomness, as you'd expect when you combine Bruno Faidutti with wargaming. If you enjoy American wargames from the 1980s, you'll like it, because it has some original and interesting features, but if you're exclusively a German game player, you probably won't.
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