If your group has worn out The Mind and Hanabi, Pandasaurus has something for you. Beasts is a co-operative card game with one rule at its heart: the number on the board must always go up.
Looking for board gamers near you? Browse local communities and find your next game night.
Find events near youTogether you are building an ever-increasing three digit number, playing cards into the hundreds, tens and ones slots of a shared board. On your turn you pick a suit and must play every card of that suit from your hand, deciding where each one goes so the resulting number is strictly higher than the last. Simple enough, until the Beasts show up.
Each Beast card represents a type, and alongside the four normal suits there are shattered versions of each. A Beast blocks its type from being played in the row beneath it, and matching cards can startle it into shifting left across the board, choking off even more space. If you have cards in hand and cannot play one, everybody loses. Three discard tokens are your only safety valve, spent to bin a single number card. Feeling brave? Beastmaster Mode strips out the discards and puts all eight Beasts in play.
Run game nights? Backseat Gamer handles RSVPs, waitlists, date polling, and game voting so you can focus on playing.
Start organising for freeThe catch that makes it sing is communication. You cannot state numbers or show your hand. You get vague signalling only, along the lines of "I can go low this turn" or "I really need someone to clear the 1s place", which is exactly the strangled, telepathic tension that made The Game and Hanabi group favourites.
Beasts is designed by Clarence Simpson, whose credits include The Wolves and Merchants of Magick, with artwork by Pauliina Linjama. It plays two to five in 20 to 30 minutes, suits ages 12 and up, and carries a $17.95 US RRP. It debuts at Gen Con on booth 215 with a general retail release following this autumn, and pre-orders are already open on the Pandasaurus site.
Sources: Pandasaurus Games
