More Safari fun with DiceAFARI
You may have seen our recent review about collecting animals on an African safari. Well, we’ve got another one for you – DiceAFARI.
DiceAFARI is a new game coming out by Stratus Games. We say “coming out” because it’s not on store shelves yet. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get a copy. DiceAFARI is currently available as a Print-and-Play version through the Stratus Games Kickstarter campaign. (If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, see below.)
The great thing about what Stratus Games has done with the DiceAFARI Kickstarter campaign is that they’ve posted the whole game online so anyone can play it. Rather than just post information about the game, they’ve posted the entire game prototype. You can read all the rules and print your own prototype cards.
(We hadn’t replaced the color toner in our printer, so our tiles are black/grey and white. But that was fine because the terrain tiles in the game also have symbols on them to help identify them.)
What do we think of DiceAFARI?
DiceAFARI is a fun family board game and we hope it gets the funding it needs to see the published light of day. And even though we just reviewed another board game about collecting animals on an African safari, DiceAFARI plays completely different.
In DiceAFARI, you lay out terrain tiles in the form of a map and randomly place photos of animals where the tiles connect. On their turn, players roll dice to determine which terrain tiles they can claim. The tiles that a player claims must make a valid route on the map. At the end of their turn, a player may take one photo token of an animal that lies between two tiles that he/she claimed. (They can take the animal photo from anywhere on the board.)
Once the last terrain tile is claimed and each player has had at least 3 turns, the game ends and you score points based on the animals you’ve collected and what sets you’ve made.
What we like about DiceAFARI
Of course we like the theme. I can’t wait for the day that I take a real African safari and take in all the wildlife in their natural habitat. But we also like a lot of the game play elements in DiceAFARI. The variable maps used for laying out the terrain tiles is great for keeping routes changing each game. And the random dice rolls to determine which terrain you can claim on your turn adds a great equalizer. This element of luck is great for family games. But players also need to make wise choices in their use and selection of their die rolls as well as which animal photos to take as they move along.
The first board game from Stratus Games that we reviewed was Gold Mine – a fun tile laying board game about excavating a mine and collecting gold along the way. And we just filmed our review of their latest published family board game – Eruption. So look for our review of Eruption to be posted shortly.
DiceAFARI will be a good addition to the fun family board games that Stratus Games publishes.
Take a further look at the game yourself and help back this fun family game project!
A Kickstarter Primer:
If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, it’s pretty cool. It’s a way for small companies to get initial project funding to make a quality product and a number of board games and card games are being published this way lately. When a project is posted on Kickstarter, a funding goal is set. Then people that are interested in the project will pledge money to support it. At this stage, it’s just a pledge of money. If the total pledges hit the goal, then the project will go through and everyone that pledged will then pay the money that they pledged. If the goal isn’t reached, no one pays anything.
