Review of Wooly Bully

Wooly Bully is a tile-laying game of sheep collection by Philippe des Pallieres.

Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 30-45 minutes
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)

Wooly Bully is published and distributed in the U.S. by Amodee Editions; it’s also published in a French edition called "The War of the Sheep".

The Components

Wooly Bully comes with:

• 77 tiles
• 1 bag
• 1 rulebook

Tiles: The tiles are all full color heavy cardboard, printed with a high gloss. They're all two-sided as well. Eight of the tiles are used for player identification: there are four secret role tiles and four public role tiles, which each identify player color (yellow, black, blue, or red). There's also a start/village tile. The other 68 tiles form the deck of tiles used to play the game.

The tiles all feature cartoonish, and often humorous, art. It's attractive and fun to look at, though it can sometimes be a bit busy too. Each tile also features various different colors of sheep, fenced off from each other. The areas and the sheep colors are all easy to make out. (Each color of sheep also has different patterns on it, making it even easier to tell one color from the others.)

Bag: A thin black cloth bag with a red tie. Mine is getting a little threadbare along the top, but it serves its purpose, which is to hold all the tiles so that you can draw them without looking (a very important point, given that the tiles are double-sided).

Rulebook: A six-page full-color rulebook.There are a number of examples, but still the rulebook was a bit hard to follow. I've also often had to reference it during play (though that may be the result of some of the rules being non-intuitive).

Overall, the tiles in Wooly Bully are colorful, easy to use, and fun to look at; they earn the game an above average "4" out of "5" for Style.

The Game Play

The object of Wooly Bully is to close off the largest pens of your color of sheep while foiling your opponents' similar plans.

Setup: At the start of the game each player takes a hidden role tile which tells which color of sheep (yellow, black, blue, red) they will be secretly rooting for. In addition, the Village Square tile is placed in the middle of the board, and each player takes a hand of four tiles.

The Tiles. Each tile is divided into four quarters, each of which may contain one of the main elements of the game: colored sheep (in one of the four colors); village; or woods. Most of the tiles just show sheep; some of them feature all four types of sheep, each in one of the quarters and divided by fences, while others may have a specific color of sheep roaming over half, three-quarters, or all of the tile.

Each tile is also double-sided; either side may be used during play. The tiles are very well-balanced as to what's on each side (for example a tile that is 3/4 yellow and 1/4 black on one side is 1/4 red 1/4 blue and 1/2 village on the other, meaning that between the two sides you can place down any of the four sheep colors; meanwhile a tile that's all yellow on one side has a special, very useful, hunter/forest tile on the other). The end result is that almost every tile will be somewhat useful to every player.

Order of Play: The regular order of play for each player is:

1. Play a Tile
2. Draw Tile(s)

Play a Tile: Wooly Bully is an edge-matching game; that means that to play a tile you must place it adjacent to one or more tiles on the board, and every edge of the tile that touches the edge of another tile must match that edge (e.g., be the same color of sheep or village or woods).

Though you have 4 or more tiles in your hand, you just place one on your turn. The extra tiles (and their double-sides) just give you additional options.

Draw Tile(s). Afterward you draw 1 tile from the cloth bag for each side of your new tile that was adjacent to the side of an existing tile. This usually means that you draw 1 tile, though less frequently 2 or 3 (or theoretically 4). Note that this does mean that your "hand" size slowly grows during play.

Special Plays: There are also two "special" plays that you can make during the game: your hidden role tile and wolf/hunter tiles. These can be played out of turn (during another player's turn or immediately before or after your own turn). You draw tiles after such placements, depending on the number of existing tiles you touched, just as with normal tiles.

(Being able to play these special tiles out of turn was what I found somewhat non-intuitive about the rules.)

Hidden Role Tiles. Each of these tiles displays a full tile of 4 of your sheep's color. Clearly, playing it is a great way to extend a field of your color, but it reveals who you are. (When you play your hidden role tile, you then take the corresponding public role tile, so that everyone can see your color.)

Wolves. These are full-tile woods that show a wolf in the middle. They may not be placed in a woods with a hunter already there. A wolf will devour all sheeps in adjacent fields.

Hunters. These are full-tile woods that show a hunter in the middle. These may be placed in woods (to keep wolves away) or on top of an existing wolf tile (to make the woods safe from that particular wolf).

Ending the Game: Players may declare themselves out of the game at any time, at which point they stop placing tiles. This is advantageous because it gives bonus points at the end of the game. The game ends when either all the players have opted out or else all of the tiles have been played.

Scoring the Game: Each player scores points for the number of his colored sheep in the larged enclosed pen that don't have a wolf in an adjacent forest. In addition they get bonus points if they ended first (+6), second (+3) or third (+1). The winner is the player with the most bonus + sheep points, with ties being resolved by the second largest, enclosed, wolf-free field.

Relationships to Other Games

Wooly Bully is an edge-matching tile-laying game with a victory bluffing element.

Because of the edge-matching tiles Wooly Bully will draw very quick comparisons to Carcassonne. As I understand the history of Wooly Bully, it was actually designed before the release of Carcassonne, but wasn't picked up until a year after the other's release, probably due to Carcassonne's success. Though the Wooly Bully tiles are much like those in Carcassonne, with a number of different elements (6 here versus 3 in Carcassonne) that must be connected up, much of the gameplay is very different.

The three biggest differences are: blocking is a much more viable strategy in Wooly Bully vs. Caracassonne, because there are more types of "edges"; long-term strategy is much more possible in Wooly Bully vs. Carcassonne, because you can hold multiple tiles at a time and even play more than one tile at certain times; and victory in Wooly Bully is all-or-nothing as opposed to Carcassonne where it's a gradual affair. Personally, I like the increased strategy of Wooly Bully, but think that Carcassonne made the better choice for the issues of blocking and victory, which combine to make Wooly Bully a bit frustrating for me (more on that in a bit). Nonetheless, the two games scratch much of the same itch, and Wooly Bully isn't a bad alternative to Carcassonne if you're starting to get burned out.

On the issue of victory bluffing, Wooly Bully takes the very simple tact of hiding which color each player is supporting. This is the same technique used by Leo Colvini's Clans and I'm sure many other games. It's a good technique that helps keep other players off balance, though in the 4-player game it fails a bit because all of the colors are in use (as opposed to Clans where at least one color isn't in use at any time).

The Game Design

Overall Wooly Bully is a fine, though not exceptional game. Here's some of the good elements:

Fun Bluffing: The bluffing element of the game is enjoyable, and much of what carries the game for me in early phases of play, as you try and slyly increase your own fields while it looks like you're working on something else.

Fair Strategy: The accumulation of tiles in your hand allows for some strategies and the planning of a couple of moves ahead.

Enjoyable Tile Laying: There's something about most edge-matching tile-laying games that I find innately enjoyable. I think it's because they're somewhat creative, and it really feels like you're building something. This one isn't as evocative as Carcassonne, with its roads, cities, and fields, but it's still neat to look at when you're done.

Here's some of the problems:

Blocking Too Easy: It's much too easy to block fields of more than a couple of tiles from closing. This can make the gameplay very frustrating, because victory is all-or-nothing (meaning you don't get any benefit from smaller fields you manage to close). I think this problem is in large part due to the six different types of edges that exist. When you get a couple of sides of a space blocked, particularly if you're blocking with village or forest, there may only be one tile in the entire game that will fill the space.

Bluffing Limited in Four Player Games: As already noted, all the colors gets used in a four player game, and that definitely limits the ability to bluff.

Analyis Issues: Toward the end of the game you can easily have a hand of 8 or 9 tiles which are all double-sided and that can result in a lot of tile flipping back and forth even if you know what you're doing.

Overall, I think Wooly Bully is a pretty average game, and so I've given it a "3" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

Wooly Bully is an interesting alternative to Carcassonne. It introduces some bluffing elements and centers around the players building singular structures rather than concentrating on many structures scattered across the board. As such, it's probably also best suited as a more casual game than Carcassonne, particularly because more serious players can somewhat break the game through persistant blocking.