Wouter & Ymke 
Some creatures have apparently decided that simply being an animal isn’t enough. They also need a profession. In Combo Creatures, you’ll meet captains, performers, travellers, cooks, painters, rangers and quite a few others. Each has an ability that can bring cards into your hand or more creatures onto the table, and the idea is to find combinations between them.
There are two standalone boxes, The Quick Ones and The Witty Ones, each containing twelve creature families. Seven are used in a game, and families from both boxes can be mixed together. The rules are straightforward, so most of our time was spent looking at those seven families and figuring out what we could actually do with them.
Combo Creatures is among the games DV Games is bringing to Spiel Essen ’26, so we had a chance to try both boxes before the fair.
👥 2-4 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 20 minutes
📝 Designers: Michael Løhde Andersen & Christian Kudahl
🎨 Artwork: Jeff Hong
🏢 Publisher: DV Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Everyone starts with five cards in hand, and another five cards are placed face up in the middle of the table to form the wild. On your turn, you either draw two cards or play a creature. Cards can be drawn from the deck, the wild, or one from each. The wild is refilled to five cards at the end of the turn.
Your hand is limited to eight cards. If it’s already full, you can’t choose to draw. The same limit applies to cards gained through creature abilities, so any additional cards are lost once you reach eight.
Playing a creature costs cards from your hand. Each creature shows between one and three coins, and you discard that many cards to play it. Those coins are also its point value at the end of the game. Every family contains ten cards with the same ability but different coin values, so the cheaper versions are easier to play and the more expensive ones score more.
After playing a creature, you may use its ability. Some give you cards, others play another creature, copy an ability or give you an additional turn. A creature brought into play by another creature can normally use its own ability as well, which is how several cards can end up being played from a single action.
Each game uses seven complete creature families, creating a 70-card deck. Two families must have the square symbol and five the spiral symbol. You can choose them yourself or use the randomiser cards, and families from The Quick Ones and The Witty Ones can be combined using the same setup.
The end is triggered when someone plays their eighth creature. The current round is completed, followed by one final full round. Every coin on your played creatures is then worth one point. Cards left in your hand also score one point each if you have at least two played creatures of the matching family. The player with the most points wins.
Artwork & Components
Jeff Hong’s illustrations are probably the first thing you’ll notice. The creature families are colourful and easy to distinguish, with animals taking their various professions surprisingly seriously. The Captain otter seems very pleased with its little sailor outfit, and I particularly like the Invoker rabbit looking considerably more powerful than something that fluffy has any right to be.
The abilities sit in a white area underneath the illustrations, and the coin values appear on both sides of the cards. Left-handed players aren’t forgotten either, as the values remain visible whichever way you fan your hand.
Each box contains 120 creature cards, twelve randomiser cards, twelve dividers, and a first player token. Seventy of those creature cards form a starter deck, so you can use that for your first game before changing the families yourself.
We were also rather pleased with the dividers. That’s not normally the component you rush to tell people about, but they’re genuinely useful here. Once you’ve mixed several creature families, especially across both boxes, being able to put everything back without sorting through a pile of nearly 250 cards is welcome.
Our Experience
We played Combo Creatures mostly with experienced gamers, and nobody needed long to get going. We did miss combinations early on. Someone would play a creature and a few moments later another player would notice that doing things in a different order could have led somewhere else. There were several instances of everyone staring at the cards after the fact and pointing out what should obviously have happened.
Some of our turns became considerably longer once we started spotting those connections. We managed to empty our hand while playing a Captain in one game, allowing us to play the top card of the deck for free. It happened to be a Builder, which drew us two cards and another two because we already had two Builders in play. A Traveler later grabbed all the Travelers from the wild and filled our hand to eight. Elsewhere, an Impersonator copied a Racer for an additional turn, with a Piper then getting another creature onto the table for free.
We spent quite a bit of time holding cards that weren’t useful yet. More than once, the card we were waiting for disappeared from the wild, or somebody got close enough to eight creatures that we had to abandon the whole idea. One player spent several turns preparing a particularly nice sequence only to discover that there wasn’t enough game left to use it. Whether that counted as unfortunate timing or poor planning was not unanimously agreed upon.
For the first few games, we were mostly staring at our own cards and didn’t pay enough attention to how quickly the other tableaux were growing. One game ended with two players reaching eight creatures while another had only four. After that, the number of creatures sitting across the table received considerably more attention. Triggering the end could leave somebody holding several cards they’d been hoping to use, and we saw that happen more than once.
Knowing the families changed what we noticed in our hands. Seeing a Racer or Piper eventually meant looking for particular opportunities rather than reading the ability again and deciding what to do with it. The cards rarely arrived in the same order, and swapping some of the seven families changed which combinations were available. Mixing the two boxes gave us another collection of creatures to mess around with once we’d become familiar with the original sets.
Our Thoughts
The part I like most is the awkward relationship between the cards in your hand. A card might be the creature you want to play next, the missing part of a combination or simply the payment required to play something else. Quite often, the two cards you’d prefer to keep are exactly the two you need to discard. A three-coin creature makes that decision worse because it costs three other cards despite having exactly the same ability as the cheaper versions from its family. Get it into play for free and you’ve avoided throwing away three cards while still putting three points on the table. We also stopped being particularly impressed by combinations that simply drew loads of cards. With a limit of eight, four new cards aren’t much use if you’ve got nowhere to put them.
I wouldn’t come to Combo Creatures looking for an engine builder. Most of what you’ve built is really just ammunition for the next combination, and once that combination is finished, you’re looking for another one. There’s very little you can do to dismantle what somebody else has in front of them. You can take something useful from the wild or hurry towards the end before they finish whatever they’re planning. That’s about it. If we were in the mood for a card game where everyone is constantly interfering with each other, this wouldn’t be the one we’d pick.
The card draw was our main frustration. Sometimes one player’s cards simply connect far better than everyone else’s, and the wild can only do so much about that. Once someone starts chaining abilities that draw more cards and play more creatures, there aren’t many ways to interrupt them. The best turns sometimes made us feel much cleverer than we probably deserved. Part of the sequence might have been planned several turns earlier, then the deck handed over exactly the card needed to keep it going. We had games where one player was clearly getting far more useful cards than somebody else, and there isn’t really a solution for that within the game.
The Quick Ones was slightly easier for us to get into. Some families in The Witty Ones made us pay more attention to conditions and the order in which we played them. You don’t need both boxes, though. One already leaves five families unused in every game. We became more interested in combining them once we knew the original families and wanted to see what happened when creatures from the two sets started appearing together.
Most of the time, we ended up playing Combo Creatures several times in a row. After one game we’d usually change a few families, shuffle everything again and see what the new combination did. Some attempts gave us a nice chain of creatures; others left somebody staring at a hand that wasn’t going anywhere. We haven’t run out of combinations we want to try yet.
📝 We received copies of Combo Creatures from DV Games.
Looking for more games coming to Spiel Essen ’26? You can find all our coverage here.
