Something I have hoped to do for a while is play some solo games and do some write-ups on them. I have to start somewhere, and today, I am going to take a look at a wallet sized solo card game called Food Chain Island by Button Shy Games. I recently backed a Kickstarter for another solo game by this same group, and one of the pledge options was to get copies of some of their other, previous titles, so I figured, why not.
The game itself consists of 18 cards, a rule book, and a card wallet to hold it all together. The pre printed cards are nice quality and the wallet container holds everything nicely. Each card has some cutesy animal art on it that is nicely designed.
The cards consist of 16 animal cards with various values and abilities, and 2 special cards that are set aside for play as sort of wild cards. Basic gameplay starts off by shuffling the 16 animal cards, which is harder than it sounds, because somehow shuffling so few cards is a bit tricky. You then place the cards out in a 4×4 grid shape, though there are some alternative layouts suggested by the instructions.
The object is to end up with only one animal remaining by having animals eat each other. Animals can only eat animals that are adjacent to each other, that have a lower number value. There is some extra trickiness here because there are also special effects that activate upon eating an animal, which can be positive or negative. This leads to some strategy though on choosing which animal to eat next. Because you may find you have an animal stranded where it can’t reach other animals, or effects that mean you can’t make a move afterwards.
I played several games of this before writing about it and only actually won my first game on the round I was taking photos of gameplay. Though I think part of my issue was I kept forgetting about the two bonus cards. These cards can be played anytime and kind of feel like they exist solely to help players get out of “stuck” situations. I would propose one way to “hard mode” the game would be to not use the special cards at all.
Overall it’s a fun little card game. The art is fun, the game itself has some planning and strategy involved which is good.
