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.
Surplus of Sloths (2026, Weird Giraffe Games) isn’t bad.
It’s a card drafting game where players try to build a hand of ascending card runs across five different suits of sloths. A market wipe mechanic pushes one leftover market card into a “surplus net” after each round, and players can view and gauge whether it is worth trying to score a suit at the end of the game.
I just gave you 75% of the rules, and designer Charlie McCarron (Skyrockets, the Kites riff I quite enjoyed) has given us a game so quick that my 12-year-old and I played it twice within a 15-minute stretch. Even winning one of those two games didn’t impress the 12-year-old, who shrugged their shoulders before admitting that the game was “only OK” before heading off to their room.
You’re right; that’s not an endorsement. My review crew joined me for a four-player game the following day, and the winner of that game also shrugged their shoulders and landed in the same rating range I landed on for this review.
Surplus of Sloths isn’t bad because its scoring mechanic is interesting. In an ideal world, you want to build up a run of three, four, maybe even five low cards of a suit, in the hopes that the highest value cards (which range from 1-7, with three X cards built into each suit to offer stand-in flexibility for numbers you don’t have) go undrafted, allowing them to hit the surplus net. That would net big points for the player who has a majority of a suit, with an additional kicker: if any X cards hit the surplus net, they match the total sum of the cards showing a number value.
That means if the green suit has a 2 and a 5 left in the surplus net, as well as a single X in the surplus net, the player with the longest run of green sloth cards will score seven points for the sum of the value cards, and another 7 points because of the X card.
In a game where scores are low, even winning a single suit could be huge. At four players, that was much more interesting than with two players, where only three suits are in the 30-card deck (versus five suits and 50 cards at the full, four-player count).
But the game’s turns are so fast and the decision space is so limited that the fun factor in Surplus of Sloths is limited. Deluxified components for this simple card game are included in the form of a handsome first-player token shaped like a sloth (obviously) and card sleeves. These add to the table presence but aren’t on display long, since you can play Surplus of Sloths in five minutes at the two-player count.
I am a little higher on Surplus of Sloths than my family and my peers. Still, Weird Giraffe has made better games, such as Wicked & Wise and Tumble Town…give those a look if you want to explore the Weird Giraffe catalog.
