Collect Souls and Get in Touch with Your Inner Grim in Reap

Jostle for souls and don’t allow the other players to get away with too many, in this soulful game of reaping and take-that.

Published by Jason Anarchy Games, Reap is a 20-minute game for 2-4 players, featuring some surprisingly adorable grim reapers.

Gameplay

The soul deck is shuffled, and nine soul cards are laid out in a three-by-three grid. Soul cards come in various colors. Each player chooses a reaper meeple and chooses a corner of the grid from which to start the game. Each player also takes a player screen and three skull tokens.

At the start of each round, each player is dealt a reaper card that they place behind their screens. Each reaper card has three actions on it: reap, sweep, and keep. Each player places his three skull tokens on these actions in any combination he wishes. You do not have to perform every action. Once players have finished placing their skulls, everyone removes their screens to show their choices.

Starting with the player who has the first player token, all reap actions are resolved: you may move your meeple one space to any adjacent soul card for each skull you placed on this action. Then all sweep actions are resolved: you may discard one adjacent soul card and draw two new ones from the deck, choosing one to replace it and discarding the other. You may do this even if another player’s meeple is on that card.

Finally, you resolve all keep actions. The number of skulls you placed on keep is your bid. You are bidding on the color of soul your meeple is standing on. Each reaper card also has bonuses for bids on certain colors of souls. Even if you do not place any skulls on the keep action, if you are standing on a soul whose color matches one of your reaper’s bonuses, that bonus counts as a bid. If another player has also bid on the same color of soul, the player with the highest bid wins. If you are the only player to bid on that color, then you automatically win the bid. You collect the card your meeple is standing on, as well as any soul cards of the same color that are connected to it.

When determining adjacency and connected soul cards, you do not count diagonally, unless your reaper card has a special diagonal symbol on it.

After all actions have been resolved, you move the first player token clockwise and replace any soul cards that have been claimed in the grid. Each player then discards their current reaper card and is dealt a new one to start the new round. The first player to collect nine or more soul cards wins the game. If two players would win at the same time, they both discard two souls and play continues.

Review

Reap is a clever game with a lot of player interaction and take-that elements that reveal themselves as you get into the strategy and gameplay. If left unchecked, players can quickly gather up nine soul cards, so you need to keep an eye on their choices, and how they’ve spent their skull tokens, when resolving your own actions. Since reaper cards and tokens are revealed before actions are resolved, you have some information when resolving actions, and the first player and order of actions can become quite important.

This keeps the game quite engaging, while the reaper card bonuses help ensure things keep moving along. The more players you have, the more jostling for the same cards you have and the more the grid evolves with movements and sweeps.

The artwork is great in this game. Each reaper card is unique and has a lot of character and a little flavor text to go along with it. It was fun to look at each card and after playing we went through the rest of the deck looking at them just for fun.

Reap can be frustrating if you don’t enjoy take-that and there’s certainly a lot of going after the leader. There can also be some luck in the souls in the grid and the reaper card you happen to be dealt. But it’s quite enjoyable to look at the board and each player’s choices they’ve made and adapt accordingly. The playtime is also perfect, keeping the game moving at a nice pace, and allowing you to play a couple of rounds of it back-to-back.

Pros: Excellent artwork, great player interaction,

Cons: Luck of the draw can go against you

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