Wouter & Ymke 
A vast land is divided into five realms: fire, ice, magic, forest and water. We arrive with a small clan of workers and start sending them around the board to gather resources, recruit creatures and take on monsters. Those creatures aren’t just there to look pretty either. They can settle in your home, travel to new places, help in a fight or, when plans go wrong, be exchanged for gold. Apparently even fantasy creatures aren’t safe from budget cuts.
In Wild World, most things you collect give you more than one way to use them. A creature that seems destined for your home can end up travelling instead, fighting a monster or being sold because you suddenly need the money. The worker placement itself is easy enough to understand. We spent considerably more time working out what to do with everything we collected. With Spiel Essen just a few weeks away, Wild World is one of Chilifox Games’ new releases for the show.
👥 1-4 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 45-90 minutes
📝 Designers: Eilif Svensson, Åsmund Svensson & Viljar Opdal Svensson
🎨 Artwork: Eirik Belaska
🏢 Publisher: Chilifox Games (review copy provided)
🏢 Publisher: Chilifox Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Wild World is played over three rounds. Everyone starts with three workers, with opportunities to gain more during the game. On your turn, you choose one of three main actions: place a worker in one of the five realms, defeat a monster, or move a worker that’s already on the board to the island to rest. You can also perform various free actions around your main action.
Most turns begin with placing a worker. Each realm gives access to different actions, such as drawing creature cards, collecting gold or evolve tokens, brewing potions or unlocking parts of your player board. There are also alternative actions that you can use by paying their cost, and their connection to the different realms changes between rounds. Worker spaces aren’t all equal either, with some requiring gold to use.
After taking a realm action, you may be able to recruit one of the adjacent creatures. You’ll need the required elemental symbols in your home and enough gold, but those elemental symbols aren’t spent when you use them.
Creature cards can be used in four different ways. Place one face up in your home and it adds elemental symbols, sometimes together with an immediate benefit. Place it in your travel area and it can uncover bonuses on your player board and score at the end. You can also discard a creature for gold or use it to fight a monster. Crystals can replace missing resources or elemental requirements in several situations, while evolve tokens can also be converted into crystals.
To defeat a monster, you play a creature matching one of the monster’s two listed elements and compare your strength with the corresponding value. Your creature and current potion level provide strength, while crystals can cover anything you’re missing. A creature showing an evolve symbol can also spend an evolve token for an additional five strength. If you win, the creature is placed with the defeated monster and your potion drops back towards the cauldron. Monsters can give points, immediate effects, permanent abilities or additional scoring conditions. One of the monster types also gives you another worker.
The round doesn’t end after a fixed number of turns. You can move an already placed worker to the island, take a reward and leave that worker there for the remainder of the round. Once a turn ends with every player having at least one worker on the island, the round ends. Everyone gets their workers back and, after rounds one and two, the alternative actions rotate.
After the third round, you score your monsters, creatures at home and travelling, progress on your player board and remaining resources. Evolve tokens are worth one point each, while leftover gold and crystals score together at one point for every five.
Artwork & Components
The first thing we noticed when putting Wild World on the table was the colour. Each realm has a very clear look, with green forest, blue water, orange-red fire, pale ice and purple magic. Once the board, player boards and rows of cards are all out, there’s quite a bit going on visually. The consistent elemental colours helped us find what we needed.
The creature cards feature a mixture of fairies, dragons, werewolves, phoenixes, armoured characters and various other fantasy creatures that I probably wouldn’t invite home, despite the game specifically asking me to do so. The illustrations use a digital fantasy style, with the colours and backgrounds matching each creature’s element. The monster cards use the same style and sit in a row on your player board throughout the game.
The workers are small wooden meeples, the coins and other tokens are thick cardboard, and wooden markers keep track of your progress. Then there are the clear, faceted crystals. They’re just resources, but somebody at our table was inevitably going to start hoarding the shiny plastic gems.
Our Experience
Our first game was very much about dealing with whatever was directly in front of us. Need gold? Get gold. Need another element? Find a creature with that symbol. We were mostly treating each action as its own little job. A few creature cards stayed in our hands because we were convinced they’d become useful later. Some did. Others spent the entire game waiting for their heroic moment and never got one.
One card in particular sat in my hand for ages because I was convinced it was going travelling. It didn’t. It ended up paying for something completely different, which was less exciting for the creature but considerably better for me. That happened more often as we played. We’d pick up a creature with one use in mind and then abandon that idea when something else came along.
The cards on offer weren’t always what we’d hoped for either. We worried about that more in our first game than we did afterwards. There was usually somewhere useful for an awkward creature to end up.
Free actions caught us out a few times. We’d decide what we wanted to do and only then notice something else we could have done first. In later games we checked those possibilities earlier, although that didn’t always make us more efficient. One resource could pay for something that gave us another resource, which suddenly made a creature affordable or put a monster within reach. And sometimes one of us would spend a couple of minutes working through all of that before going back to the obvious move we’d considered at the start.
Our approach to the five elements wasn’t particularly consistent between games. Sometimes the available creatures gave us good reasons to concentrate on a few. In another game, the cards weren’t cooperating and we spread ourselves around more. Monsters could pull us somewhere else again, especially when an early ability looked useful enough to chase.
We were also far too happy to keep improving things at first. Another bonus looked useful, so why wouldn’t we take it? Eventually we got better at noticing when there simply wasn’t enough game left for another upgrade to pay off. At some point you have to stop making the machine nicer and actually score with it.
The island probably made us look at each other’s boards more than anything else. Someone would move there a little earlier than expected and suddenly the rest of us were counting workers because the round might be shorter than we’d assumed.
Three players was our favourite count. Two was quicker, often around an hour for us, while three usually brought us closer to ninety minutes and made the shared parts of the board busier. Four worked too. I’d rather play that way with people who already know the game, though. Once everyone’s personal board has developed, there’s enough to look through without adding three people doing the same thing before your next turn.
Our Thoughts
The worker placement isn’t really the part I’d come back for. It’s what holds the game together, but the creature cards are much more interesting to us. Keeping one at home might make later recruits easier. That same card could travel for points, defeat a monster or simply become the gold you’re missing right now. Quite often we knew we could do something useful. Choosing what we were willing to give up was harder.
Wild World is also quite forgiving. Somebody taking a worker space you wanted usually means looking for a more expensive or slightly less convenient route. Your entire plan doesn’t suddenly collapse because a meeple arrived before yours. We were fine with that, although players who enjoy harsher worker placement may miss having more ways to interfere with each other.
Interaction is fairly light in general. You watch the available creatures, worker spaces and the approaching end of the round. Most of the time, though, you’re looking down at your own board.
That board can become a problem of its own. Placing a worker isn’t complicated. It’s everything you might do before and after placing it that can slow things down. Maybe you could convert an evolve token first. Perhaps that crystal is better used somewhere else. There’s another bonus you could trigger. We became quicker at dismissing combinations that weren’t worth the effort, but an AP-prone player can still find plenty to stare at. Especially with four.
The fantasy side didn’t come through as strongly for us as the artwork initially suggested either. I like the creatures, and seeing monsters collect around your player board looks good. After a game, though, we weren’t talking about our clan’s adventures. We were talking about the creature we should have kept at home or the crystal we’d spent one turn too early. Fighting a monster mostly feels like working out whether you can meet its requirements.
That doesn’t bother me much in this kind of game, but I wouldn’t come to Wild World mainly for the fantasy adventure. I came away much more interested in trying another combination of creatures.
And that’s probably why our later games left me more positive than the first. We weren’t discovering extra rules or suddenly playing a different game. There were simply things we’d overlooked before. A creature we’d previously ignored looked useful because of what we were doing this time. A monster gave us a reason to head somewhere else. Sometimes a plan that looked good at the start didn’t survive contact with the cards on the table.
For us, Wild World works well when we’re in the mood for a medium-weight eurogame where we can build up our own boards and still have enough freedom to change direction. After several plays, there are creature combinations and different approaches I want to try. I’m quite happy to have another go at them.
📝 We received a review copy of Wild World from Chilifox Games.
Wild World is only one of the games we’re looking at ahead of Spiel Essen 2026. Find the rest of our pre-Spiel coverage here.
