Wouter & Ymke 
Run your own conservation organization and make the jungles of the Amazon flourish! In Life of the Amazonia, players are restoring the rainforest by planting trees and flowers and attracting numerous animals. Your goal is to develop the most prosperous jungle!
1-4 players, ages 14+
Playing time: 60-120 minutes
Designer: Jamie Bloom
Artwork: Sophia Kang
Publisher: Bad Comet
https://badcomet.co/
Life of the Amazonia launches on Kickerstarter on October 12:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/badcomet/life-of-the-amazonia
Life of the Amazonia is a bag building-game: each round players will spend blindly drawn resource tokens to perform their different actions. This allows them to buy better resource tokens to use in future turns, expand their jungle, and place trees, flowers and animals in their jungle. On top of that, they can also increase their storage capacity to transfer tokens to the next round, and gain nature cards giving different benefits or points at game end.
The goal of the game is to build your jungle in such a way that you can take full advantage of the animals you place in it. An animal must be placed on a specific type of terrain, and each animal scores points in a different way, listed on its card. For example, some animals will earn points when you put them next to trees or plants, for adjacent animals, for the size of their habitat, and so on.
Additional points are also awarded for the total number of trees and plants you have placed, and the scenery cards purchased.
✨ First of all, the game comes with a great table presence: the waterfall looks stunning and the animeeples are a treat for the eye.
📖 If you’ve already played bag builders you will quickly master the rules, it’s just getting used to the many possible actions.
🕰 The playing time can exceed 2 hours, which is a tad too long for a family+ type of game.
➕ The placing and scoring of animals reminds me a bit of Cascadia, which is certainly a good thing.
✴️ Replayability: there are 4 sets of animal cards and you can also randomly combine them; players also each have a unique animal with its own scoring way to which they adapt their strategy.
The Kickstarter campaign for Life of the Amazonia launches on October 12! You can find the campaign here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/badcomet/life-of-the-amazonia
