Friedemann Friese's game Fauna is finally out with English units and text on the cards and board so I immediately sought out a copy. It is surprisingly hard to find at the online retailers but I finally ended up coming by a copy through an amazon.com reseller. It was full price but I was OK with that.
The game is a bit like Wits and Wagers. It has a board with a map of the world divided into regions. At the bottom of the board are several scales showing a broad range of size and weight measurements. During the game you will use cards which feature an animal. The card box shows the animal name and in how many areas in the world it can be found. Then the players use cubes to make their guesses on the board. You can guess where the animal lives, how much it weighs, how long it is, and how long its tail is. This is done by placing a cube on the map or on a section of one of the scales. Only one cube can be in any location or spot on a scale.
Once everyone has placed all their cubes or passed the other half of the card is revealed and compared to people's guesses. You get points for being in or adjacent to the correct areas and being in or adjacent to the correct spots on the scales. You lose any cubes that were placed on incorrect guesses but you will always have at least 3 to play with and will gradually gain cubes that you have lost back if you guess correctly.
We've played the game 2 times so far and it has been thoroughly enjoyable. The kids and adults both love it. It's not a gamers game but you can play the odds and game it up a bit by watching where people are placing and trying to get points by placing next to them. You score for each correct area on the map so if you are confident and are not blocked out of areas you can recover alot of points and catch up by piling into the right regions of the board.
In our games we were using only about 6 animal cards to complete the game. This obviously varies by how well you know the particular animals because the game ends when a certain point total is surpassed.
Given that there are 180 cards and they are double sided (easy side/hard side) I think this game has more than enough plays in it to last a lifetime. You also learn how surprisingly little you know about the animals. I couldn't believe how wrong I was about how big some animals are or where they live.
To play this game the players all need at least some knowledge of the world and of how to estimate size and weight. With my younger son we would ask him to compare to something he knows, like the size of his dad or himself. "Do you think a giraffe is as tall as 2 Dads or 3?", "Do you think a Turtle weighs more or less than you?", "Does this animal live in the Desert or the Jungle?". Then we would show him the points on the scales or the board that corresponded roughly to his guesses. It has worked out well since he won one of the two games ;-)
Non-gaming adults should like this game a lot but I wouldn't play it at a metroburb game night unless everyone requested it for some reason. For kids the sweet spot is probably 8 or 9 years old.
Highly recommended!
Rating: A
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