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Date Played: 8/31/2006 Description: Bison is a truly neat game from one of the Barrister's favorite game designers. Territory control, resource management, and tile laying beautifully sculpted into a single game. You will find familiar tastes of El Grande and Carcassonne, but the flavor of this game is all Bison! Description from Mayfair Games: Before the arrival of the white man, the area now known as Idaho was home to the Nez Perce. Living off nature's bounty, these brave hunters would follow the great herds of bison, gathering supplies to survive the brutal winters. When the salmon appeared in the mighty Snake, Salmon, and Columbia rivers, they were there, ready to catch the river's bounty. In Bison, you become the leader of a band of brave hunters, setting forth to lay claim to the most plentiful hunting grounds. Your hunters will gather bison, salmon, and wildfowl each season. But competition for the best lands will be fierce! You will need to use your hunters to build canoes and tents, staking your claim in the best areas, before your rivals can! But your supplies are limited. You will need to feed your hunters to give them the strength to fulfill the tasks you ask of them. And if you need a larger canoe, you will need to trade your hard-earned foodstuffs at the market.
The player who can most effectively marshal their hunters and manage their supplies will control the best hunting grounds and deliver the largest amount of food to the tribe for the coming winter. Can you prove yourself to be a great warrior and powerful spirit of your tribe? At first, I objected to the market being open at all times to any players regardless of ones turn. I felt it could possibly interrupt the game flow. Then I realized interrupting the game flow by announcing a purchase from the market on an opponents turn could force an opponent to make a decision based on what he or she thinks you may be doing with your new purchase. I had a chance to play the game first with 4 players then again with 2, as one would think the strategy did change a bit between the two games, but both games were equally challenging. I would love to see an expansion to 5-7 players.
I absolutely can't find a thing to say against the game
other than the land tiles are oddly shaped, and I am
generally not fond of colored wooden cubes, but who
(other then me) really cares about that. Bisons! Gather up, hunters! We are chasing for the tasty meat! Look! Wild turkeys in the plain and salmons in the rivers! This is fertile land! Build the teepees! Get your canoes out! We are stocking up for the harsh winter! So, that was my excitement when I first played Bison. I like nature things, even on game boards. That means Bison, by nature, already attracted me before I played. After I played it, I like it more. I like Bison because it has many components that I like to have in a game. Beautiful boards, fairly simple concepts and rules, strategies to put my brain power into, and all the fun going extreme and being playful. As for boards, I really enjoyed laying tiles (you get to lay one tile with multiple terrains per turn). It was fun because it was a big part of strategies and it was where you can be creative (i.e., extreme). When we first played, reflecting the characters of the players, we made a huge plain with a lot of bisons, which was, I think, both good and bad. The good side was it had many bisons. The bad side was it got competitive and you had to put lots of resources to get the bisons. An expected situation. Anyway, the bottom line was that I enjoyed developing the Prairie.
The challenging part of this game for me was to decide how to play. The rules were
fairly simple; you put the most resource in a terrain to dominate and thus to
harvest from there. I could quickly think about some basic strategies of different
kinds. What I really contemplated was which way of playing is the most efficient. I
couldn't come up with an answer while I was playing, so I played rather randomly. I
thought it turned out to be the most interesting way to play for the first time. Now
I feel like I know how to behave (or at least look like) in more meaningful ways.
How many hunters to put where? Upgrade which teepee and when? They can be easy
questions if you are playing just for a pastime. When you start trying to predict
people's moves and be the most competitive player on the board, the decisions could
be very hard. The big thing about the system of the Bison is that you use the
resources you just harvested for the next phase of the game. That is, you have to
spend, and spend in a wise manner, to earn. It sounds like a golden rule in any game, and
it is particularly true in Bison. It translates to "the classic fun of playing a
boardgame".
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