Get Wild: A Real-Time Animal Dice Game

Pick your park and race against your opponents to fill it with its native animals, while getting rid of the ones that don’t belong.

Published by The Op, Get Wild is a real-time dice game about rolling and resolving dice as fast as you can, passing off animals you don’t want to your opponents, and collecting the ones you do.

Gameplay

The map tile is placed in the center of the table and each player takes a national park player board. Each board represents a different park and shows one animal that is native to it. There are six different types of animals in total in the game. Depending on player count, each player takes two to three tokens of each animal type except their park’s native animal and places the tokens on their player board. Each player also takes a set of three dice. One die rolls a type of animal, one die rolls one to three, and the third die rolls a direction — left, right, to the map tile, or a question mark which allows a player to choose the direction.

Each round, players roll their dice and resolve them (when possible) as quickly as possible. You do not have to wait for other players to roll their dice before you go again. Players keep rolling and resolving their dice until the round ends.

The dice tell you what animal tokens to move, how many, and in which direction. During the game players will be moving animal tokens onto their opponents' boards or onto the map tile. The exception is your native animal. When you roll that, then the direction die determines which direction, if possible, you take that animal from, moving it onto your board.

Once a player has managed to move all non-native animals off of his player board, the round ends. The player who ended the round gets three points, and then each player earns one point for each native animal on their player board and loses one point for each non-native animal (however, you cannot lose points from previous rounds). You then reset the game to play another round. The first player to reach twenty points wins the game.

Review

Get Wild is pure chaotic, real-time fun. There’s not much strategy here, but there’s plenty of hilarity as you move animals about, passing some to your opponents, or grabbing others off their mats. It’s all about taking in the situation as quickly as possible and responding to it at a similar speed. It’s fast, frenzied, and frenetic.

The components are nicely made and the game looks attractive. The dice are smaller than standard size and rather adorable. The animal tokens are also easy to distinguish and solid enough that they should stand up nicely to repeated plays, and we liked the artwork on the player boards for the different parks.

There is also an additional variant in the rules, if you want the game to be even more chaotic: whenever a player rolls a three along with a left or right, all players must pass their park player boards in that direction, and must now play with their new park trying to collect a new native animal.

The rules could use a little clarification on what happens if you roll your native animal and there are none to collect in the direction the die tells you to take them from. Can you pause rolling, and wait to see if any get moved there? Or do you immediately have to roll again? It’s a scenario that’s easy to come up with a house rule for, but it is an ambiguous situation in an otherwise straightforward and simple game.

If you enjoy the chaos and speed of pure real-time games, Get Wild delivers exactly that, with a nice presentation and a pretty theme.

Pros: Pure real-time fun, nice components, theme

Cons: A bit of rule ambiguity

Disclosure: we received a complimentary review copy of this game.