Wild: Serengeti Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Wild: Serengeti, a board game published by Bad Comet. Compete as rival filmmakers to make the best documentary on the wildlife of Africa's Serengeti.

The Venn diagram of nature-lovers and board game players must have a substantial amount of overlap, based on the last couple of years in board games. There have been a lot of titles featuring animals or zoos in the last couple of years alone. I recently looked at the cooperative Miller Zoo, which has resulted in me spending a bit more time in the genre recently. One of the ones I have gone back to is the much-less cooperative Wild: Serengeti from 2022.

It is a game for 1-4 players, and it takes 1-2 hours to play. The best experience is with 2 players.

The thematic concept here is that you are directors making video documentaries about the wildlife of the Serengeti, and are trying to capture better scenes for your film than your competitors can capture for theirs. Of course, this is all just an excuse to get adorable ani-meeples on the table, but it is a good starting point nonetheless. This is played out over 6 rounds, in which each player takes turns spending resources to perform one action at a time. Each round ends when all players pass in lieu of taking an action (typically due to no longer being able to afford another).

There are 8 actions that you can spend “coin” on during each of your turns. They mostly cost either 1 or 2 coins, and many of them are similar. Ultimately, your objective is to complete various scene cards that will score you points and give you further bonuses. Each of those scene cards requires different animals, often in different positions relative to each other and relative to the terrain types printed on the board. The game starts