Writing board game reviews often sends reviewers down weird research paths to write, hopefully witty, introductions. Today’s game Australis, follows turtles navigating the EAC, or East Australian Current (as most famously featured in Finding Nemo with Crush and Squirt). But I found EAC is a more commonly used acronym for Estimate at Completion, Equivalent Annual Cost, Election Assistance Commission, and Extended Acute Care, which now has me thinking this game is really about either turtles working in accounting or health care.
Australis is a competitive game by Alessandro Zucchini and Leo Colovini for two to four players ages 10 and up that plays in about an hour that features a slew of mechanisms including turtles but not turtles in lab coats asking about your recent symptoms.
Gameplay Overview:
Each game round takes place across a few phases.
The first of which is players will draft dice and perform their actions. Besides the one larger red die, there’s as many of the blue, purple, white, and yellow dice as players in the game.
The white dice provide points and cards, while the yellow dice add fish to your school of fish. Purple dice have numbers on them that represent the highest value area you can place a coral, while the numbered blue dice advance your turtle in the EAC.
The cards tied to the white dice rolls are drawn from a face-up display on the board and provide a bonus when a specific die color is activated. These bonuses might be scoring a point, advancing a turtle one spot, or gaining a fish. Two limitations are that you may only have one of each type of bonus in each card slot and a maximum of three cards under a die color. An alternative to adding the card to your player board is to discard it in exhange for a single shot of the card’s effect.
After all dice are activated, scores are tallied. Points are scored for coral based on each of the areas on the board, with turtle positioning breaking ties. Additionally, turtles are scored for their current position in the EAC. Lastly, fish are scored for the number of fish if you have enough food tokens. There are locations where food tokens get picked up by your passing turtle, while others can be won through a dice competition. Dice competition? What dice competition?
At this point in the round, there’s a dice competition where all players with numbered dice roll off for a pair of tiles. All copies of the lowest number rolled between all the players are discarded and this process continues until one player wins and they get a choice of a gold tile (worth some number of points) or a tile worth fewer points but which gives that player a food token. The second place player gets the other tile.
The game continues for five rounds when the tiles earned from the dice competition are added to the players’ scores and the highest score wins.
Game Experience:
Australis is a little strange in that nothing it does is complicated, but there’s quite a few dissociated pieces to keep track of. Personally, I love the multiple paths to victory, but it can make the game slightly harder for people to grasp during the first turn or two. There is a bit of action economy and optimization, so maybe the turtles are a bit more focused on accounting than I was originally giving them credit for.
With each die providing an alternate path to victory points and changing how the actions influence each other, the abundance of options can lead to some analysis paralysis. Do you go for the white die, which gives one or two cards and one or two points, or add fish? Gaining white cards boosts future dice actions by adding cards to each die color. Meanwhile, fish are a huge source of points if you can get enough food tokens, and the two aforementioned ways to earn food involve advancing your turtle and winning the dice battles. And turtle position gives points each round, breaks ties, and, with the right card, allows you to place coral in higher scoring areas. You can see how some players might get frozen.
Of all the mechanics, the dice competition feels the most disconnected and the most random. For each round, the dice are rolled and placed on the board to draft, so while random, it gives all the players the same options. The Red die rolls the highest numbers, making it a good option for dice competition, but it doesn’t advance any other areas. Besides giving you the first-player token for the following round, I found it to have limited utility. I’ve seen the person with the red die roll low on its first roll (that was me, by the way) as well as someone else ride it all the way to a victory tile.
The intertwined nature of these mechanics, ranging from a race, to area control, to set collection, to a random game of dice war, is interesting and makes the game hard to effectively describe and review. I watched my son focus solely on fish and win fairly handily as he scored 28 points on the last two turns of the game, but that also relied on him getting lucky in the dice battles to pick up multiple food tokens. Meanwhile, my balanced approach of cards boosting all the other dice was fairly effective if you ignore the 25+ point deficit from first place due to my lack of dice luck.
Fish and turtle position seem to generate the most points on a round-to-round basis, but if someone was to go all-in on coral, there might be a way of generating a similar score because the eight zones range from one to four points per round but the placement depends on your turtle’s position and the value of the purple dice.
Production-wise, the game is generally great with only a few small complaints. I love how each color of coral is different, adding dimensionality to an already vibrant board. My biggest struggle was that the one- and three-point fish tokens were identical, other than their size. Marking them or making them more easily identifiable as different would’ve been a small quality-of-life improvement.
With the two victory tiles available at the end of each round, this game will score quite differently with three and four players than with two, as competition spreads the victory tiles out. Additionally, the randomness of the dice competition may end up depressing scores by making it harder for one player to score all the fish points.
Final Thoughts:
If coming up with witty intros is hard, this conclusion is tougher, and that’s due to a lack of turtles in lab coats and the odd nature of this game. It’s simple to play and fun, but the challenge of teaching multiple mechanisms makes the teach to complex to serves as a gateway game. At the same time, the weight is gateway-plus, also suitable for a gamer family game, akin to games like Fossilis or Flamecraft. Australis is a good game and one I’m happy to play if anyone asks, but it’s not likely to be a forever game for me.
Final Score: 3 Stars – Australis is a kitchen sink full of turtles, colorful coral, and familiar game mechanics that work well together but the sum isn’t greater than the parts.
Hits:
• Looks great and has great production value
• Each mechanism is easy to explain
• How the mechanisms work together is clever and allows multiple paths to victory
Misses:
• Dice competition felt disconnected
• Fish might be overpowered
• Teaching four different mechanisms for such a light game puts it into a weird category
