Tusk! Surviving the Ice Age Review

boardgamequest.com:

When I think about the life of early humans I picture a challenging life full of hardship and danger where day-to-day survival was their only goal. Compared to now where completing Wordle before your morning cup of coffee feels like an achievement and I get the sense that we’ve gotten soft as a species. Like my biggest hurdle to this introduction has been the graphic design of the title. Is this game called “Tusk! Surviving the Ice Age” or “Tusk: Surviving the Ice Age”? These are the small things that keep board game reviewers up at night. Likewise, the editors may be equally frustrated when I write Tusk! and then the next word isn’t capitalized.

And in case anyone is interested; it’s Tusk! according to page 2 of the rulebook.

Tusk! is a semi-cooperative game that starts with a small collection of tiles, possibly loaded with resources, and the player meeples placed around the board. Each player has a card giving them unique end game scoring conditions and a single Tribe Member on the board.

Each turn is comprised of three phases—The tribe phase, the hunt phase, and the season phase.

The Tribe phase is broken into three steps: 1. Grow the tribe – spend tasty food tokens to add workers 2. Send out Hunters – Commit tribe members to the hunt 3. Send out Gatherers

The gatherer step, weirdly the meatiest part of your turn, gives each Tribe Member two actions which are move, gather, recover, and fight. Moving allows you to move up to two tiles. Gather allows you to collect one resource from the space you’re in, recover allows you to recover from injuries, and fight allows you to fight another player’s tribesman on your space.

Besides being mean to each other, players can also trade and gift resources at any time. The resources