I don’t remember where I first heard about Amoebunnies, a self-published game from a designer who’s not made anything else, but I’m so glad I did. This game was attractive to me for a couple reasons: it was cute, and I needed more cute games to play with my bunny-loving seven-year-old daughter. But the thing that intrigued me most was seeing it described as “Root lite”. Was there really a game I could play with my kids that would introduce them to the world of asymmetric play that would also be fun for adults?
The story
The amoebunnies have fallen from the sky and are doing different tasks on the earth. Each player begins with the same resources, but the movement rules, special abilities, and winning conditions are different for each character. The characters also have different difficulty ratings, which means you can give the easier characters to newer or younger players, and the more experienced gamers can pick a more complex character. There are movement cards, which tell you where to place characters and other bits and bobs (depending on which characters are involved), and the coveted jellies, which are like a wild card but are rare and difficult to get. The game is a race to finish your special task.
I opened up this game for the first time to play a four-person round. My husband and I had played various asymmetric games, so we were pretty comfortable, but for the friends playing with us, it was new territory.
One of the things I instantly appreciated was that there are separate booklets for each player, and these booklets can be laid open so that the rules and abilities of your character can be quickly referenced. The inside of the booklet goes into a lot more detail, with pictures and instructions that are clear and easy to understand. There is also a card for each player with the main interactive abilities of each character, so you can see how you might bump up against each of them differently.
I played my first game with the character Sari, who moves around the map leaving little presents for other characters to pick up. The winning condition: Sari must distribute all the presents she has. The markers which allow Sari to leave a present are constantly shifting, so she draws two cards at the end of each turn (these cards have colors on them, which can be used to travel a path or arrive at a destination of the same color). If another character lands on a space where she’s left a present, that player can pay a color card to her to receive the present. When taking a present token, the other character can draw from the present deck, which has smaller gifts (like a free movement, drawing another color card, or getting a jelly) and some extra special gifts (a movement to anywhere on the board, drawing multiple color cards, or getting multiple jellies). Playing with this character felt very different when I was playing with people who were stingy with their color cards. This felt silly to me, as it was always either an equal trade-off or an excellent deal for them, so there wasn’t really a downside to always taking an available gift—unless you were trying to hamper my character, which was definitely happening in some cases.
The four-player experience was so much fun, and although I didn’t win, we decided to play through one more turn with each player, because we each felt close to winning, and we all “won” after one more turn, which indicated to me an excellent balance in the design. We immediately played a second game.
Over the following week, I played Amoebunnies four more times with two different characters. First I played against my seven-year-old as Cam, and she played as Sari. Cam is an amoebunny who is quite large and, when he fell to earth, fell apart into 12 pieces. The goal is to bring all those pieces together. Cam can move further distances depending on how highly his pieces are stacked (a stack of two bits of Cam means any stacks or single pieces can move three spaces, where a stack of eight or more allows five movements). Cam can also leave splatters which, as other people go through allows Cam to draw another color card. A stack of four Cams blocks anyone from being in the same spot unless they pay with a color card. He joins stacks together by playing a color card that matched the pathway between the stacks.
We were both content to focus on the goals of our own characters, and it was a light, easy play-through. I played my eleven-year-old daughter as Cam, and she was Midori, who has pieces that block paths unless you are willing to pay her one of your precious jellies to remove them. I was not willing, and she really messed with the paths I wanted to take, so I used my stacks of 4+ Cams to block her from spaces she needed to reach to teach her a lesson. This made it clear how adaptable this game is for players with different levels of competitiveness in play. You can pick characters who mostly mind their own business and play a relaxed game or you can choose characters that require more interaction and allow for more “take that” elements. A two-player game with Sari involved isn’t going to be that competitive, but there are other characters that really shine when it comes to making wins difficult for other players.
I played two more games as Midori, once against Violet and once against Sunil. The more games I played, the more I appreciated how much game is packed into such a small, innocent-looking box. It felt incredibly balanced; almost every single game ended with the loser having one or two turns left before a win was possible. I was impressed at the variety of characters while still keeping the game accessible, interactive, and engaging. The design is so playful, and every time you pull out a new character to learn things about, it’s like opening a new present, because of the individualized boxes with the character pieces in them.
I don’t want to neglect mentioning how quickly this game plays. Despite the asymmetry and how much is going on, the game takes about ten minutes per player. Each character has something to do every turn, and there’s quite a bit of interaction. Movements other characters make often effect you too, so it’s engaging even when it isn’t your turn. Even when playing this for the first time with all four people being new to the game, it only took 45 minutes to learn and play.
The quality of the components is top notch. The table presence is outstanding, and set-up time is negligible. If I had to complain, I would nitpick and say that I wish the jellies were actually squishy; handling hard jellies doesn’t feel right. It’s also harder, when playing with more than two characters, to find the space to neatly put all the necessary tokens—they end up being either stacked, so you can’t see them as well, or spread out so that it’s a little more messy-looking. The boxes which the character pieces are in are not going to last forever, especially with eager child fingers. I keep trying to come up with more negative feedback, but I’m struggling, which I think is a testament to how well thought out this game was.
There are some empty spaces in the box waiting to be filled by the expansion, which adds three characters, and I can’t wait to get them and see how they play. As it stands with the six characters available, this game is beautiful, engaging, and I want to keep coming back to it, trying new characters, becoming more familiar with ones I’ve played, interacting with different characters, and playing with different player counts. Amoebunnies is a game that entices me to keep exploring, and I’m going to be bold and say I think it is a game for everyone. I can’t wait to see what else comes from the brain of this designer.
