Two Rex Plays #14 - Life of the Amazonia
In this edition of Two Rex Plays we’re discussing Life of the Amazonia, a bag building, tile placement game designed by Jamie Bloom and published by Bad Comet Games. Draw from a bag of tokens to build your own custom jungle and populate it with a series of exotic animals, trees, and aquatic flowers. Life of the Amazonia is currently live on Kickstarter – we think it’s great and highly recommend checking it out.
Here are the design features we enjoyed:
Animeeples – All of the animals are represented by their own meeples, that’s the shared pool of animals that everyone competes for as well as each player’s unique starting animal. The designs are all fantastic, but the Tamarins and Leaf Frogs are so strong you’ll be tempted to alter your strategy just to get your hands on them.
Jungle tableau – By the end of the game your jungle will be full of animal meeples and tokens for the trees and aquatic flowers. They conjure up a of a living, breathing jungle full of diversity and with great table presence.
Multiple routes to victory – In our play throughs the game mechanics seemed well balanced with multiple legitimate paths to victory and no obviously overpowered strategies. A narrow jungle build where you’re looking to maximise points from one or two species works just as well as spreading your bets and pursuing multiple different goals.
Tabletop Simulator mod - We played using the official Tabletop Simulator mod which has been made available as part of the Kickstarter campaign. This is one of the best constructed mods we’ve played in a long time – including a great 3D model which recreates the waterfall (a centrepiece shared by all players that keeps tracks of the jungle tiles and amounts of flora you can place). The animal meeples look great in their virtual incarnation, and the background scripting eliminates virtually all of the in-game admin.
Manageable decision space – As with all medium weight games, the different mechanics can appear overwhelming at first. But we found you quickly grow accustomed to them and that they were easy to appraise and devise a strategy. The game hits the sweet spot of offering plenty of replayability and choice without needing to invest an entire weekend to get your head around the rule book.
Our first play session drifted past midnight which is always a sign that a game has hit all the right notes with us - with several little ones to look after the following morning it’s never advisable to stay up so late on a school night! The experience is very similar to reaching the last hundred pages of a great book and finding that you just can’t put it down until you reach the end, even when the sensible thing to do is to take break and come back to it another time. But the feeling of wanting to see something through to completion is both wonderful and fleeting, so it’s best to make the most of it when it comes along, even if you know you’re in for payback the following day.
Interested in Life of the Amazonia? Find out more here:
Kickstarter Page
Bad Comet Games website