Author Teel McClanahan III has just launched a Kickstarer for his first game, Teratozoic. The game is a deck building card game where you’re trying to stabilize a monster’s gene pool in order to create the biggest, baddest monster at the end of the game. For those familiar with Teel’s work, there’s a familiarity here. For those not, you’re still going to get a kick out of the artistic quality of Teratozoic.

If you want to know how to play the game, just checkout the Kickstarter Page, or download the latest rules for it. Better yet; I’ve embedded a video of Teel explaining the rule rules of the game at the bottom of this post. The rules are super easy to grasp, and can be read as you play your first game. I was able to teach my 2 oldest kids how to play in about 10 minutes without many questions on their part, and very little rules referencing as we went along with our game.

Once you’ve gotten hang of the flow of the game, Teratozoic is fast-paced. As you get more into the game, you start to realize that while building your current monster is important, you really need to start thinking about your end-game monster. Everything you do, every card that enters your gene-pool, decides what kind of monster you create once you reach the Teratozoic Era. All that really matters in the end is a single color monster with no open ends. Create one with the largest score and you’ve won the game. I’ve sometimes found myself so caught up in monster creation during my normal turns, that my final turn suffered, and it cost me the game.

Overall the game is highly entertaining, intelligent, and has a bit of a different spin that other deck building games I’ve played. It’s a game that I can see having a lasting place in my collection, and one that I’m sure I’ll keep enjoying with my children time and time again.

You can back Teratozoic for $1 and get the print-and-play version, or you can back it at the $20 level to get the print game when it’s funded. I can say that the quality of the prototype I received was extremely high, so I can only imagine what the finished products will look and feel like. Go ahead. Back this one. You won’t be disappointed.

A prototype copy of Teratozoic was provided free for review by Modern Evil Press.

 

 

 

  • Comments Off on Kickstarter Preview—Teratozoic