Creature Caravan

I really appreciate Ryan Laukat's world of Arzium, it's truly impressive how many games he's designed and created the art for as Red Raven Games. His art stands out amongst other artists and illustrators. For me it reminds me of an alternate dimension of Studio Ghibli - large and ancient mechs, tiny forest beings, various humanoid and anthropomorphic races, all packaged in a magic and wonderous world.

In Creature Caravan, the story is that you're fleeing the threat of these Ember zombies, trying to reach a known safehaven, the city of Eastrey. You'll be moving along a randomized map with different terrain and have to navigate and progress as best you can. Along the way, you may encounter and add people, creatures, and other beings to your caravan.

Probably one of the key parts of this game is that its simultaneous play. Each player rolls 5 dice and will try and puzzle out how to use them. You can have only up to 12 cards as part of your caravan, so you'll have to be choosy in terms of what you want to keep for your strategy. Plus, the game has only 12 rounds, after that the game ends and you'll score for how far you got, points from cards, and any other bonuses that you gained from your travels.

Everything in this game is a race: you're racing to get to Eastray, you're racing to make deals for resources and points, and you're racing to defeat Ember zombies that you may have encountered on the map. In fact, they're nearly unavoidable, but at least you can deal with them and the negative points from the zomies aren't as harsh.

However, although simultaneous play is desired by people who want little to no downtime, the issue is that its inherently non-interactive. You're often just "doing your own thing" and you don't really have to care what anyone on the table is doing in their corner. Caravans don't block each other, you can share spaces, even tents, so in may ways you're all just silent caravans moving along at your own pace, passing each other. To combat this, there are optional rules that allow trading between players, but that feels like a bolted-on player interaction through light negotiation.

Though, I suppose its easy for me to say that, as someone who often just plays solo and plays solitare-like gameplay. The solo mode here is very easy to operate. You just roll dice like a player and assign it to actions where possible on the priority list. With the Wanderers expansion, you even get a second bot that operates a little differently from the base game.

And you may have noticed that this is another one of those "large deck of unique cards" which seems to be an ongoing trend for tableau games, which makes sense given that it allows for inherent replayability. In this game the cards can give you special abilities and sometimes powerful dice action spots. The expansion I feel helps a lot as you can attach item cards to existing cards, helping you get a bit more than the 12 card limit.

The awkward thing is that there is pretty high variance in card cost, and you can get unlucky with getting cards that ask for a lot of resources and its early game so you don't have those on hand. There's ways to pitch cards for resources, but the game can feel tight up until you start making those early trades on the market, which you want to do before they get closed off by other players.

Creature Carvan feels like a really chill dice and card puzzle. I like the mechanic of assigning dice for actions, and here its pretty lenient in that spaces tell you the minimum die value, meaning high rolls are just generally better. Which feels odd to say given the premise, that you're trying to escape this foreboding zombie threat, but honestly they don't feel scary mechanically. I think that aspect is a little lost, but its not really the feel that they're aiming for with this game. Overall, its fun and there's a lot to explore with the cards and how they interact with each other.