tabletoppingboardgames 
Beetles spend most of their early lives hidden underground, which sounds fairly peaceful. In Stag, their lives involve careful feeding, competition for space, evolutionary traits, and eventually a public disagreement in the middle of the table. You’ll raise different species from grub to pupa and then adult beetle, collecting everything they need along the way.
Most of the game is about planning actions and managing resources, but fully grown beetles eventually take part in showdowns. That’s when players decide whether to forage together or fight for all the points. After several rounds of caring for an insect, trusting the person opposite you suddenly becomes surprisingly difficult.
Note: Stag is due to launch on Kickstarter shortly after this review is published. You can find the campaign here.
👥 1-4 players, ages 12+
⌛ Playing time: 60-120 minutes
📝 Designer: J.J. Neville
🎨 Artwork: J.J. Neville
🏢 Publisher: Split Stone Games (prototype copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Stag is a resource management and action programming game where most of each round happens simultaneously. Everyone has five action tiles, and each tile shows three different actions. You place one tile in each column of your personal mat, lining up your chosen action with the coloured strip through the centre. Once everyone is ready, you perform your five actions from left to right.
Where you place those tiles also affects the resources you receive. After completing the actions, you collect the eggs, wood, water, sap, fruit, and nectar that remain visible on your mat. Covering a space means losing that resource for the round. You might find the exact action order you need, only to discover that it covers every drop of water. It’s then back to rearranging the tiles and pretending this was always part of the plan.
Your beetles develop through three stages: grub, pupa, and adult beetle. To introduce a new grub, you choose a beetle card from your hand and pay its egg cost. Grubs require wood, water, and enough ageing before becoming pupae. Pupae don’t eat, but they need further ageing before changing into adult beetles. Once an adult appears, it needs sap, fruit, and nectar before it’s considered fed and ready for a showdown.
The action tiles let you introduce new grubs, develop your insects, age grubs or pupae, draw cards, gain eggs, exchange resources, advance on trait tracks, tuck cards, and upgrade tiles. Upgraded tiles stay that way for the rest of the game and improve the actions printed on them. You can even upgrade a tile and use its improved action during the same round, provided you placed everything in the right order.
Beetle cards have several uses. You can play a card onto one of your two card mats and raise that species, or tuck it under your action mat. A card tucked on the left gives you a permanent ability, while one tucked on the right can add a resource to your income. Tucked cards also show end-game objectives, so a beetle you want to raise may also contain exactly the ability or scoring condition you need elsewhere.
Development happens on the circular central board. Grubs begin on the outer ring and move inwards as they become pupae and adult beetles. At the start of every round after the first, the middle navy ring rotates one space clockwise. This changes how the spaces connect. Every grub has a route towards a pupa space, but two pupa spaces share one beetle destination, so another player can occupy the space you were preparing to use.
Players also advance on three evolutionary tracks: mandibles, colouring, and wingspan. These provide end-game points, and the sole leader of each track receives a different temporary benefit. You can progress by using actions, collecting pupa trait tokens, or taking part in showdowns. Your lowest position across all three tracks also affects your final score, so completely ignoring one trait can be expensive.
After the action and resource phases, all adult beetles that can be fed must be fed. When at least two different players have fed beetles, each participating player sends one beetle into the centre. Everyone secretly chooses either forage or fight. If everyone forages, the six available points are divided and all participating beetles gain traits. If exactly one player fights, that player takes all six points, while everyone still gains trait progress. If several players fight, their beetle cards are discarded, they lose a trait, and the points disappear.
Surviving beetle cards are saved for scoring after their showdown. The standard game ends immediately after the fifth showdown, although shorter and longer variants change this to four or six. Players then score their played beetle cards, point tokens, objectives, and positions on the trait tracks. Whoever has the highest total wins.
Artwork & Components
We played a prototype of Stag, so the components in our photos aren’t necessarily the finished versions. Still, they already give a good idea of how the game is intended to look. The first thing that caught our attention was the circular board. Its four layers represent the stages of beetle development, with the rotating section changing the available routes during play. A large wooden beetle sits in the centre and helps keep everything aligned.
The beetle cards were probably my favourite part visually. Designer J.J. Neville also created the artwork, illustrating the different species in a detailed painted style. The cards include both common and scientific names, which makes them look a bit like pages from a field guide. The white backgrounds leave enough room for each beetle’s colours, horns, and markings to stand out.
There are also many wooden pieces, including separate tokens for grubs, pupae, adult beetles, resources, and trackers. The different shapes make it easy to recognise what you’re looking at once the table begins filling up. The pupa trait tokens add more colour around the board, while the action tiles gradually turn golden as players upgrade them.
The prototype already took up a fair amount of table space, mainly because of the central board and the number of personal mats. Each player has an action mat, two card mats, resources, tucked cards, and various collected tokens. We can’t judge the final component quality yet, but the prototype made the beetle life cycle easy to follow and gave the artwork enough room to be noticed.
Our Experience
Our first game of Stag was mostly spent reacting to whatever was directly in front of us. We collected resources because they were available, introduced new grubs because we had enough eggs, and upgraded action tiles because an improved action sounded useful. None of those choices was necessarily bad, but they didn’t form much of a plan. A few rounds later, we had grubs waiting for wood, pupae waiting to age, and adult beetles asking for food that we had forgotten to collect. It looked like a thriving beetle nursery, provided nobody checked whether anything was actually being fed.
We also made the fairly predictable mistake of treating the action tiles only as a way to select actions. We arranged a sequence that let us do almost everything we wanted, carried it out, and then reached the collection phase with barely any resources left uncovered. At first, that felt a little punishing. During our next game, we began checking our future income before committing to the actions. We sometimes accepted a less useful action because it left us the water, wood, or sap needed for the following round. That was the point where the action tiles really started making sense to us.
The central board took us a little longer. In one game, we prepared a pupa for adulthood and assumed that the final move was safe. Another player reached the shared beetle space first, leaving us with a fully aged pupa and nowhere to place it. There was a brief rules discussion, followed by the discovery that nobody had made a mistake except us. We had been so focused on our own mats that we hadn’t noticed what another player was preparing. After that, everyone paid much closer attention to the board rotation and the beetles developing around them.
By our later games, we had stopped planning one round at a time. Before playing a new grub, we checked what it would need as a pupa, whether its space was likely to remain available, and which food resources we would eventually have to collect. We also became less attached to the cards in our hands. At first, every interesting beetle felt like something we should raise. Later, we were more willing to tuck a card for its ability or objective, even when hiding the artwork underneath a mat felt slightly wrong.
The showdowns changed as our group became more familiar with them. Early encounters usually ended with everyone choosing forage because nobody wanted to risk losing a beetle they had spent several rounds developing. Eventually, one player realised that being the only fighter was worth six points. From then on, every promise of cooperation received far more attention than it deserved. One player claimed they had “learned their lesson”, chose fight again during the next showdown, and seemed genuinely surprised that nobody trusted them afterwards.
What we liked was that these personal moments didn’t make the rest of the game irrelevant. One bad showdown could cost a beetle card and a trait, but points still came from objectives, other beetles, tokens, and the three trait tracks. In one game, the player who gained the most from the showdowns still lost because their other scoring areas had been neglected. That kept us watching several parts of the table rather than treating each confrontation as the only thing that mattered.
Our Thoughts
For us, the action tiles remained the most interesting part because the problem was different every round. The beetles you’re raising, the spaces on the board, and the resources you need keep changing. Stag does let you improve your actions, but those upgrades never remove the need to adapt. An upgrade helps, but it doesn’t solve the round for you.
Raising beetles, upgrading tiles, climbing the trait tracks, and preparing objectives all use the same five actions each round. Trying to push every area at once usually leaves several things half-finished. We did better once we picked two or three things to focus on and accepted that something else would fall behind. One objective might push us towards collecting a set of pupa tokens, while another makes one trait track more important. That changes where those five actions go.
Although everyone plans on a personal mat, we still had to follow what the other players were doing. Players occupy development spaces, compete for trait-track leadership, collect pupa tokens, and change which routes remain available. You need to understand what somebody else is preparing, even when they aren’t attacking you directly. Then a showdown happens, and suddenly that indirect competition becomes much more personal. That gave us reasons to watch one another without every round becoming an argument.
The first game is still where we had the most trouble with Stag. There are many icons, several resources, multiple uses for cards, three development stages, trait benefits, objectives, placement restrictions, and a separate set of showdown results. None of these rules is especially difficult on its own, but learning them together makes the opening game slower than the basic round structure suggests. The player aids help, although we still checked the rulebook several times.
Simultaneous planning doesn’t automatically make the game fast either. Players arrange tiles at the same time, but someone who wants to calculate every possible result can still hold up the round. With our group, this became easier once we stopped looking for a perfect solution and accepted that covering one useful resource was sometimes unavoidable. Groups that prefer quick choices may find themselves waiting while someone rearranges the same five tiles for the fourth time.
How well the showdowns work will depend quite a bit on the people around the table. Anyone mainly interested in negotiation or bluffing could find that they happen less often than expected, since most of the game is still spent arranging actions, collecting resources, and developing beetles. On the other hand, players who dislike hidden social choices may resent having six points or a developed beetle affected by one reveal. We enjoyed the showdowns, but they were just one part of a much larger game.
We finished our first game interested in the theme but unsure whether all the parts worked together. By the end of our later plays, we weren’t just discussing what had gone wrong. We were already planning which beetles we wanted to raise next time, which cards we should have tucked, and how we might avoid blocking ourselves on the central board again. The first game asks for patience, and I still think the iconography takes longer to absorb than it should. Once those checks stopped interrupting play, though, we found ourselves looking forward to seeing whether our next plan would actually work. That feels like a good reason to come back to Stag.
📝 We received a prototype copy of Stag from Split Stone Games.
