Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I know how to sell a game. In my day job as an inventory manager for a board game café, I regularly pitch people on games they know nothing about, and I often succeed in making those games sound interesting. The approach is usually straightforward:
“Catan is a game about gathering resources, building cities, and trading with other players. It’s also very, very rude.”
“MicroMacro is a huge Where’s Waldo, but instead of looking for random people, you’re trying to follow their progress around the map to solve crimes and figure out what happened.”
“Hive is just like chess, in that all the pieces have their own moves, but you’re not dealing with 600 years of scholarship and study, so it’s much more approachable.”
Every now and then, you get a game that requires a bit more qualification, like Wilmot’s Warehouse:
“It’s technically a memory game, but it isn’t really. It’s a game about telling stories that happens to be a memory game. You won’t even notice.”
Rare is the game that defies my ability to do a quick pitch. So rare is it, in fact, that until Beasts came along, I’m not sure I could have named one.
It’s not that Clarence Simpson’s card game is difficult to describe. As the publisher’s website says, “Beasts is a cooperative card game where players work together to build an ever-climbing three-digit number by covering one digit at a time.” That’s easy enough. You could also describe it simply by saying, “You start at 000 and try to end up as close to 999 as possible.” The trick, as you may have noticed just now, is that it is nearly impossible to describe Beasts succinctly without making it sound deathly boring.
It is so difficult, in fact, that if you’re in a position where you have to pitch Beasts over and over again, you develop a reflexive preamble, an instinctual “This is going to sound really boring, but I promise.” It’s very important that people aren’t given cause to mistrust you, and suggesting that a game like this might be a ball without such a prelude would be immediate grounds for them to do exactly that.
Beasts really is fun. I swear. And all you’re doing is playing cards down to the table in an attempt to make number go up. The active player picks a suit from their hand and plays all of their cards in that suit out onto the table, one at a time. Let’s say you just started the game by playing your only diamond, a 3, into the 1s slot. The board now reads 003. I decide to play my two spades, a 1 and a 9. The goal here is to be as efficient as possible about the rate at which said number go up, so it makes the most sense for me to play my 9 on top of that 3 (009) and then my 1 on the 0 in the 10s slot.
You may be thinking that that would result in 019, but every time the 10s ticks up, the 1s gets cleared, and every time the 100s ticks up, both the 10s and the 1s get wiped. It would be a pretty quick game otherwise, since nothing can get played on top of a 9. It would also be fairly boring, but for those beasts in the title. They are aces, which here are distinct from 1s, and place increasing restrictions on where you can play cards. While this game is light on strategy and tactics, the looking threat of a new ace gives players a bit more to do with their brains than they might otherwise have.
Somehow, Beasts manages to be consistently and truly pleasant, an enjoyable way to spend 10-15 minutes. It’s surprisingly hard, even at its lower difficulties, but it never feels unfair, and it’s such a zippy experience that nobody minds bringing the car back around. Perhaps its greatest value is as a cooperative game that even families with young kids can partake of. I’ve played with 5 year olds. They’re not good at it, but they can grok the general idea.
Beasts: it sounds really boring, but I promise.
Beasts details
- Designer: Clarence Simpson
- Artists: Pauliina Linjama
- Publishers: Pandasaurus Games
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 2 - 5
- Age range : 12+
- Time range : 20 - 30 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Communication Limits, Cooperative Game, Hand Management
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.1896 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about Beasts.
