As the wooden wheels of your cart rumble along the dusty earth, you look back in wonder at the caravan you’ve assembled. Strange beasts flap heavy wings in the air, a frog-man ambles along peaceably, someone’s riding a giant snail? Sure, why not! This is the wonderful world of Creature Caravan, a brand new board game designed by Ryan Laukat, and published by Red Raven Games.
Red Raven Games provided me with a review copy of the game when I visited their booth at PAX Unplugged, and now that the game’s back in stock I thought it would be the perfect time to dive in and see what it’s all about!
What Is Creature Caravan?
Creature Caravan Stats:
- 1 - 4 Players
- Est. Game Time: 60 Minutes
- Game Genre: Tableau Building, Dice Assignment
- Complexity: Medium
Creature Caravan tasks players with competing to score the most points as they trek across a varied landscape full of strange creatures and dangerous Ember Zombies. As the name implies, players will slowly build up their caravan in the form of creature cards that they place by their board.
After playing through multiple rounds of the game, players will accumulate points by traversing the land, defeating zombies, trading in goods for points, and adding creatures to their caravan. The player who scores the most points wins after 12 rounds wins.
How Do You Play Creature Caravan?
To play the game, you’ll roll five dice and assign those dice to actions on your board. When you start the game, you’ll only have a few options available on your tableau. You can assign dice to gain creature cards to your hand, gain resources, or battle Ember Zombies.
Where the complexity comes in is with the introduction of those creatures cards. As you add them to your tableau by paying resources to play their cards, you’ll unlock new slots to place your dice.
Placing dice in new slots unlocks additional benefits, like the ability to travel faster/further on the board, more attack to fend off Zombies, more card draw, etc.
How Does It Feel To Play Creature Caravan?
Creature Caravan is one of my favorite types of games: the kind that starts fairly simply, and slowly gets more crunchy and complex as you play. Because of this, it’s easy to introduce new players right into the action.
I really like the mechanic of rolling dice and assigning them to spots on your caravan (you can assign dice of a matching number or higher to its associated spot - in other words, a die roll of a 4 could be placed on a 4, 3, 2, or 1 spot on your board).
I never spent a turn without at least a few interesting options in front of me, and as the game grew in complexity I ended up having too many cool things I wanted to do in a turn.
The only area of the game that feels a little less-baked than the rest of the game are the mechanics around Ember Zombies. These zombies show up when you arrive at various spots on the map, and place tokens on your board.
You can then add dice to slots to attack the zombies, which is really just another place to score points on your board. Of all the elements in the game, this feels least intuitive - though for my opponents who went all-in on attacking beat me pretty squarely, so maybe shows how much I know!
Creature Caravan Stuns With Its Art and Creature Design
As usual, Ryan Laukat doesn’t just shine as a game design, but puts his artistic talent on display by illustrating all of the artwork for the game as well. It’s this artwork, I think above all else, that gives the game so much personality.
Set in the world of Arzium, which also includes Laukat’s games Above and Below, Near and Far, Now and Then, and the all-new Arzium RPG, this is a setting full of bright colors, quirky characters, an internal logic that pulls it all together.
Without knowing all the in’s and out’s of the world, I can tell this game is illustrated by a creator who knows his universe down to the smallest bug and largest lumbering dinosaur.
Creature Caravan - Let the Cards Surprise You!
I have a hot take for new players: I do not recommend going through and looking at all the character cards before you start playing. I know some of you might be screaming right now about “open information,” “optimal gameplay,” and “combo effects,” but it’ll be okay! Hear me out:
I don’t think your first play through is likely to be optimized for the best combing of creature effects anyway, so going into the game and letting each new flip of a character card surprise you will add a whole layer of brilliant discovery to the game!
Creature Caravan - Final Thoughts
There’s a cleanness of design on display in Creature Caravan that allows the player to truly settle into the game before adding creatures to your tableau expands the horizon of options. As I’ve mentioned above, the length this goes to welcoming players into the game cannot be overstated.
If you’re looking for a game that let’s you roll dice (which we love, of course), plot movements carefully, collect a cadre of cool characters, and sink into evocative illustrations, Creature Caravan is the game for you!
The copy of Creature Caravan used in the creation of this review was provided by Red Raven Games.
Review Summary
Pros
- Bright, evocative artwork
- Clean, simple, elegant game design
Cons
- Attacking mechanics feel slightly under-baked
Giaco Furino joined the TechRaptor team as a Staff Writer in 2019 after searching for a dedicated place to write and talk about Tabletop Games. In 2020, he… More about Giaco
