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Title: Designers:
Illustration:
Publisher: Players: Age: Duration: Price:
Rats of Wistar Simone Luciani, Danilo Sabia Candida Corsi, Sara Valentino Cranio Creations 1– 4
about 13+ years
about 90 –120 minutes about 60 euros
Reviewer
Stefan Ducksch
Stephan Zerlik
Playing appeal
6
6
The constant moving around of help- ful rodents quickly becomes tedious. After a few games, you’ve seen almost everything, and it then feels repetitive.
four, that can be either light bulbs or compasses.
Using light bulbs, players can buy the invention cards that are laid out on the edge of the large game board. These cards provide a special effect when played or grant victory points at the end of the game. However, you can’t build
inventions right away, as you need not only the right resources but also to take the “play an invention card” action. Nothing is easy.
The invention cards provide col- ored symbols that allow players to race for points among the shared goals. Players can also use cards to complete missions in the farm- house, using actions generated by the compasses. A mouse might move, doors will open, cards will flip, and more guest mice can be invited into a player’s burrow.
There are rewards for everything, and the further you advance in the farm- house, the more valuable they become. The big cheese awaits players in the last storage room of the basement.
Our task, therefore, is to find the right place for our chief rat on the rondel, place enough mice adjacent to it (which costs special actions or tiles), and use them to act as efficiently as possible. Figuring it all out requires some tinkering and in- creases downtime to an unbearable lev- el when players are learning the game. Planning the perfect action requires you to start from the end and work backward to find the right space on the rondel. If someone else chooses it before you’re up, you’ll have to redo all that planning.
Ironically, the beautiful artwork of the game gets in the way. Everything is wonderfully thematic: the house with its hidden objects, the burrows, the amusing inventions on the cards. It all requires a lot of space. A LOT of space. It’s not only beginners that will lose track of things. Rats of Wistar needs to be played un- der excellent lights, as the symbols on the cards and farm are truly mouse-sized. If you misread
something, you
get to—once
again—recalcu-
late your entire
turn.
This should explain why I no longer have any
interest in
playing this game
with more than three
people. It also takes a lot of
patience and dedication to
introduce the game to new
players. When they sit down,
they will only understand a
fraction of what’s going on
within the chaos, with most
of the rest only becoming
clear during final scoring.
The crucial question then
becomes whether players en-
joyed it enough to play again soon. If so, the game does run much smoother in subsequent sessions.
There are other problematic details. If you have a large table and don’t need it for something else, you can leave ev- erything set up for the next game. But, if you have to cram the game back into the stuffed box, you’ll curse having to dismantle the rondel each time. This can be done with the included pin, but it’s tedious and, in my opinion, a flawed de- sign. Additionally, two of the player col- ors are too similar. And then there’s the issue with the cards.
There are negative cards in the game that allow you to mess with other players. They don’t fit thematically or in terms of gameplay. All the groups I played with re- jected them, and they should be removed. If you’ve got lingering bad feelings about asteroids or poisonous animals, you know what I’m talking about. In this setting, though, the attacks feel even more out of place than in the two notable predeces- sors. Incidentally, those games don’t have a fixed number of rounds, so everything feels freer. Rats of Wistar is compressed right from the first turn.
Honestly, I still don’t quite know what this game is trying to be. Worker place- ment, construction, exploration, and tab- leau building all in one? Gameplay is as packed as the admirably compact box. Focusing helps, so incessantly improving
your burrow or spending a lot of time on the farm is good. And you should spend as few turns as pos- sible moving up
in player order. Problem is, if
you narrow your focus too much, you will feel like you’ve missed part of the game. This might be because the theme is so strong, helped along by the many options available on the invention cards, at the farm, and in the burrows. Navigating all of this is where the game comes alive, but only if once you’ve gotten a grip on every- thing. To get there, you have to heavily engage with Rats of Wistar. And that requires patience. (sb)
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