Wooly Wars

We got to play a round of Wooly Wars in the back yard today, under the shady canopy.  Our little round table was barely big enough to hold it, and the last few tiles had to be put somewhere else because we ran into the edge.  Here is the BGG page.

This is a simple tile-placing game, trying to build the largest enclosed sheep pen of your color.  You oddly start off without showing which color you are playing.

A sheep pen is enclosed by fences or forests, and if a wolf is placed in that adjacent forest, all connected pens are threatened, though a hunter tile can cancel out a wolf tile.  In the end, the protected pen with the largest population wins.

There are some odd extra rules that happen in the middle of the game, like exposing which color you are playing.  With two people, it felt irrelevant.  Then there is the shepherdess tile that lets you change colors, also irrelevant.  You can also choose to stop placing tiles and take a bonus; I think the first player to stop gets 6 points and the second gets 3, but why do this?  It looks like you could reasonably expect the biggest safe population to be about 8 or 10 sheep, so most of the game can be undone by this quitter bonus?  Again, this felt irrelevant for two players.  

After our one game, we figured we should try the next game without the wolf and hunter, and maybe score the top two populations for each player, and skip the baffling bonus for quitting early.

It was fun adding tiles and messing with each other's groupings.  This feels like a keeper.  The art is top-notch.  Simple, cartoony, but solid.

BGG shows editions in at least a dozen languages, all of them with better names.  "Wooly Wars" is actually a terrible name: there is no war ... no piece ever attacks another piece.  Among those other names, Wooly Bully is even worse.

Some of the pics on BGG are close-ups of the sheep doing funny things, which we didn't even notice when we were playing.  Sure enough, we pulled tiles out of the bag late that night and found a lot of sheep in funny poses, even pairs of sheep smooching.

The back of the little rulebook had a fun story about the history of the game and its creator.  Another good feature of BGG is that you can lookup the designers, publishers, artists and anyone else involved.  Here is the page listing the other titles by the creator.  

Of the few variants posted by BGG contributors, my favorite was the "werewolf rule" where you can play a wolf on top of a hunter to remove (eat) the hunter.