Board gamers tend to love tactility—the feel of a hand of cards, the weight of a good miniature, the clickity-clack of a big stack of poker chips. Myself I like a game where you control exactly one piece. Dungeon crawlers and worker placement games are fine and all, but give me a game where I shuffle a single thing around a map, and I’m immediately on board.
No surprise, then, that I was attracted to Habitats, which gives players a little vehicle to shepherd around a board as they pick up tiles. I’m tempted to give it 5 stars just for that, but I’m told that would be “unprofessional” and “dumb,” so I guess I’ll have to actually play the thing too.
Habitats is a tile-laying game for 1-5 players. It takes about 30-60 minutes to play, and plays best with any player count but 1.
Gameplay Overview:
In Habitats, players are competing to build the best wildlife preserve. Your turn comprises four simple steps:
- Take a tile from the shared grid of tiles (called the marketplace). The chosen tile must be in front of or to the side of your jeep’s current position.
- Rotate and move your jeep to fill the space left by the taken tile.
- Replace the empty space left by your jeep with a random tile from the bag.
- Place your chosen tile in your personal preserve. The tile must be placed orthogonally adjacent to at least one other existing tile.
As might be expected, most of the tiles are Animals, which have a single type (color) of habitat they inhabit, as well as a set of habitats they must be adjacent to in order to score, and the point value for satisfying those conditions. Other tile types include Watchtowers, Flowers, Tourists, Gates, and Camps, which all have unique scoring conditions based on the quantity and adjacency of tiles within your preserve.
Habitats contains three separate rounds of a fixed number of turns, depending on player count. At the end of each round, points are scored for the two scoring conditions randomly set out during setup, and after the end of the third round, players finally score the tiles in their preserves. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.
Game Experience:
I believe a good tile-laying game needs a compelling hook to stand out, and Habitats’ hook is the marketplace. Moving your jeep around is fun, but the restrictions it creates on what tiles are available to you this turn, and how your choice will affect future turns, are really interesting. Each individual turn is simple, with only three options available to you, but the marketplace grid is big enough that you’re incentivized to look forward a few turns to maximize your score.
All the tiles in the marketplace also help mitigate randomness. New tiles are placed behind your jeep, so you’re never able to immediately capitalize on a lucky draw from the bag. New tiles are also unlikely to be snapped up immediately, due to the restrictions on what tiles you can take on your turn. The whole drafting mechanism is an inspired bit of design, and it helps solve a lot of problems I tend to have with open drafting games.
The actual tile-laying part of the game is serviceable, if unexciting. There are arguably too many different tile types to have to teach, but once you internalize them, the spatial puzzle of arraying your animals in mutually beneficial habitats is clean and compelling. Placing your tile at the end of your turn is also a nice touch, as it gives you more time to plan your tile placement without holding up the rest of the players.
Even with that, though, Habitats has the potential for some serious downtime. The game is quite simple, but there are a lot of elements you can consider if you want to–how to chain your turns together in the marketplace, how to maximize the end-of-round goals, and so on. If all players are of similar levels of contemplativeness, turns move quickly and smoothly, but if even a single player is prone to analysis paralysis, it can grind the game to a halt.
Habitats also suffers from some frustrating decisions around the periphery of the game. The end-of-round goal tiles are underwhelming, and some production choices make parsing the game more difficult than it should be–text and icons rotated in different directions, and iconography that manages to make things even more confusing. Lastly, while I don’t normally discuss solo modes as part of the review, I feel compelled to warn readers that Habitats’ solo mode is a bit of a travesty, which removes the goal tiles entirely and does nothing to keep the marketplace dynamic with just a single player.
Final Thoughts:
Habitats is a great little tile-laying game, perfect for families, but with enough potential crunch to satisfy heavier gamers as well. The learning curve is more onerous than it should be, but it still takes a very short time to understand the rules, and the act of pushing your little Jeep around the marketplace never gets old.
Final Score: 4 Stars – A cute and clever family-weight tile-laying game, with a fun sense of spatiality and tactility.
Hits:
• Fantastic drafting mechanism
• Good balance of short-term and long-term decision space
• Quick turns help keep downtime low
• Jeeps are fun to move around!
Misses:
• Goal tiles are underwhelming
• Potential for analysis paralysis
• Production issues
• Bad solo mode
