Tembo: Survival on the Savanna is a solo and cooperative tile-laying/tile-placement game from The Op Games.

This is a game all about exploring the Savanna but keeping the elephants alive and away from the Lion and Lioness!

This is a lighter game for players ages 10 and up.  The time range seems about right at 30 to 45 minutes.  It can play solo.

Is this game good enough to make our Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Laying/Tile-Placement games?  Let’s take a look!

Rulebook

The rulebook is decent.

The game set-up and components are on opposite pages and this works great.  The components are annotated and the set-up is well-labelled.  This part of the rulebook is excellent.

The rulebook is generally okay.  It’s not great on some edge cases: For example: when you rotate a card, can you can also rotate it 45 degree to get diagonals?  There’s no discussion of that!  From a consistency point of view, it seems like you can (because diagonal is considered adjacent), but it’s not clear.  Why are some spaces purple and white on the final board?  Do you have to place final elephants in the white zone?  When the Matriarch is by herself on the board, what does playing the Matriarch card means? When an elephant line gets disconnected, are there any special rules?  If the Lioness eats an elephant, and goes to sleep, then the Lion moves to her space with the Matriarch … it seems like you SHOULD NOT lose (because the Lioness is sleepy), but the rules make it clear whenever the Lioness and Lion are together .with the Matriarch … you lose!  This seems inconsistent with the theme of the game (sleepy Lions).

Oh yes, after a few passes over the rulebook, it’s clear that each player MUST DRAW TO THREE CARDS no matter what, on their turn.  So, they keep drawing. They should have made that clearer, instead it’s kind of buried in the text.

The rulebook was decent, you can learn the game, but don’t expect there to be a ton on edge case clarifications.  You’ll have to make your determinations in a few places. 

Unboxing and Gameplay

Tembo is a fairly standard sized box. See Coke can above for scale.

Each player will take the role of one of four herds of elephants.  See the gorgeous wood elephant meeples (elepheeples?) above.

The thing is, there is only ONE matriarch who guides ALL the elephants!  See is the bigger blue elepheeple above.  Her job is to try to keep her elephant herds away from the Lioness and Lion!  See above for the gorgeous wooden pieces! Elepheeple and Lioneeples!

See above as the matriarch is shepherding the pink and grey elephants above (in a 2-player game).  Every new elephant placed on the Savanna MUST be adjacent to another elephant!  It doesn’t matter what color because this is a cooperative game: you can place your new elephants next to any adjacent elephant.  It’s worth noting that elephants are considered adjacent in both orthogonal and diagonal directions!  This is important  to note for later.

Each player has three cards that do double-duty; they form the grid for the Savanna (this is a tile-laying game after all) AND they allow placing the elephants to the Savanna.   Each player always has three cards at the start of their turn: each turn starts with the active player playing a card to the grid THEN playing another card to determine how to place elephants onto the grid.

How you are sitting at the table actually determines HOW you can place your card and your elephants!  Note the arrow in the upper left corner of the card above: if you are facing the grid, you can only play this card to the grid IN THE DIRECTION OF THE ARROW.

If I am facing the grid, you’ll notice all my cards (above) in the grid pointing away.

Interestingly, when you place a card/tile onto the board, the spot you choose has a special power (usually how many elephants to energize).    See above: one spot energizes 2 elephants for ALL players, one spot gives just you 4 energized elephants! You start with only 3 energized elephants, but you can only place energized elephants on your turn!

The second card you play is discarded, but it allows you to place elephants on the grid ONLY IN THE PATTERN (or just a single elephant) specified on the upper left corner of the card.  If we discarded the card above to place elephants, we could ONLY place 2 energized elephants east-west (next to a previously played elephant somewhere on the board).

To win the game, players must have the elephants visit 6 Landmarks on the board AND make it to the final location.  To “visit” a Landmark, some elephants need to occupy the purple spots of the Landmark.  See above as 2 grey elephants and 1 pink elephant visit the waterfall Landmark and earn the waterfall standee!

If you want to “scoop up” all the elephants on the board, you can play the Matriarch card (elephant card above) which returns all elephants to the players!  You might do this at certain points to limit how many elephants get chased away by Lions (but see below).

The only problem is that it costs 2 (or 5) energy to engage the Matriarch to gather all the elephants!  See the energy track above.  If you ever go to zero energy, you lose!

You can place elephants on the trees to get more energy!  See the red trees above!  If I can place two elephants there, I can get more energy! Yum!

As you play, the Lion and Lioness move.  If they are ever in a Location with elephants, all the elephants are chased off!  (They are not eaten, no.  Even though they are taken out of the game forever).  If you ever get BOTH the Lion and Lioness on the same space as the Matriarch, you also lose!  If you ever run out of elephants, you lose! If you ever run out of energy, you lose! If you ever run out of cards, you lose!

You can only win if your elephants visit all 6 Landmarks AND you make to to the final spots at the top of the board!  See above for  a winning game!

This production is gorgeous and will enchant you.  The Vicente Dutraite art and the wooden meeples are just so beautiful.

Mixing Bad News and Good News

Many cooperative games have a separate deck of “Bad News” cards, that is, cards that keep the game flowing against the players.   Interestingly, the “Bad News” cards are all interspersed into the same draw deck as the player cards!   In this case, there are two “bad” cards.

The first is the Liones/Lion cards.  When the players draw these cards, they activate the Lioness and Lion (in that order): the Lioness/Lion moves, and then will eat (pardon me, “chase”) all elephants in its region.

If a Lioness/Lion eats (chases) some elephants, it has to rest (until it stands again).

Although the Matriarch cards are “Good” cards (you can play them to move the Matriarch and collect all elephants on the board), you are FORCED to play them if you ever get two of them!  This is a unique kind of bad news because (a) you don’t have a choice and (b) the energy cost is much more significant at 5 (rather than 2).   Getting a Double Matriarch (like above) is actually bad!!

Intermixing the Good cards and Bad cards into one deck reminds us a little of The Siege of Runegar (see review here) where the Troll cards were interspersed into the playter decks of this deck-building game.

The Game Plays You

Here’s the thing; I have a problem with this game:  It’s too random.

First, there’s not much strategy with the Matriarch cards because you are pretty much forced to play them as soon as you get them.   If you don’t, you will almost certainally get a Double Matriarch where you are FORCED to play them and lose 5 energy.  Energy is a  very limited resource; you can maybe handle losing 5 energy once … maybe.  You are almost guaranteed to lose if you take 2 Double Matriarchs.  That’s 10 Energy, … and you start with 10 or less (depending on the number of players).

After playing 10 games, I found that you pretty much want to play the Matriarch card AS SOON AS YOU GET IT (which costs 2 energy) so that you aren’t forced into a double Matriarch (which costs 5 energy).   That’s not really a strategy; you can’t save it up until you need it.   Every time I tried to “be clever” or “push my luck” by saving Matriarch cards, I got screwed by the double Matriarch and immediately lost.   It seems like the only viable “strategy” is to immediately play a Matriarch card, even if it doesn’t make any sense.  This is from playing about 10 games.  I lost every single game until I started doing that.

The game is playing you.

The problem is that the “Bad News” cards cluster and cause major havoc.  You ALWAYS have to draw up to 3 cards, even if you don’t want to!  “I’ve got a Matriarch card, I’ll just defer drawing for now!”  NOPE! You can’t do that!  There’s no choice.

The game is playing you.

Games like Pandemic try to mitigate this clustering a little by distributing the bad news cards more equally over the deck (by separating the deck into 4 pieces and distributing the bad cards in those 4 sections).  I wish Tembo did something like this to help mitigate this clustering.  Or give me a choice to NOT draw.  Nope.

The above has a list of the distribution of cards.  Let’s be clear: You can lose in the first turn if you draw 4 Matriarch cards in a row!  That’s right, because you are FORCED to keep drawing!  Two Double Matriarchs can cause 10 Energy loss … and you just lose.  Sure, it’s unlikely, but it is possible.  I believe this shows how random this game can be.

At the end of the day, your game will probably be won or lost by how the bad news cards cluster, despite how well you play during your turn.

Depressed

This game was on my table all weekend long last weekend, and I was so depressed by it.  It looks great!  But I hated how random the gameplay was.  I was able to find a way to occasionally win (by ALWAYS playing  Matrirach, even when it didn’t make sense, so as to avoid the double Matriarch), but it felt much less strategic than I hoped.

Which is too bad, because the cards the player plays have a lot of choice and can be clever!  Which card do you play on the board?  Which special power do you activate?  Where do you place a tile on the board to keep Locations adjacent?  When do you use the special tiles?

I know there is a great game here.  But the randomness of that deck keeps me from loving it.

If I just stopped here. I’ll probably give this a 5.5/10.   The ONLY reason I am keeping this is because of the art and I think some of my friends might like the gameplay, despite how random it is.   Maybe you won’t mind how you have to play to win, maybe you just love living in this world.  This game is gorgeous and some of you may absolutely love it for what it is.

Solo Game

There is a solo mode built-in (thanks for following Saunders’ Law).  

The solo player gets about 24 elephants (collected from two colors: see above as a I mix pink and grey).   The game plays “about” the same, but the solo player doesn’t get the special powers when they play a card on the board: you always just get 4 elephants when the play a card to the board.   And you can, at one time during the game, discard a Matriarch to avoid a double Matriarch,  The solo player just plays turn after turn by themselves until they win or lose.

This true solo way is “okay” to learn the game, but I don’t think it’s the best way to play the game solo.  The problems are two-fold: First, you don’t get the special abilities on the board, which is one of the only ways you can be “smart” in the game …so the solo mode takes away one of the ways you can be clever and sort of dulls the games.  Second, the double Matriarch “fix” isn’t that great.   Sure, you can choose to get rid of a Matriarch ONCE, but as I pointed out earlier, the double Matriarch problem is pretty steeped into the game.  It’s just not fun to play when are you are MORE likely the get a double Matriarch (see below).

A better way to play solo is to play two-handed solo: the solo player plays two elephant tribes, alternating between them as-if it were a 2-Player game.  I think this is a better solo mode for many reasons: 1) You are playing the game the way it was meant to be played: no special rules for solo player.  2) The odds of getting a double Matriarch are actually reduced because you are distributing the Matriarch cards between two hands!   In the true solo mode, you are much more likely to draw double Matriarchs because you have exactly one hand!  At least with two hands, the double Matriarch is less likely.  Finally: 3) Being able to use the special powers on the board allows you to be more clever.

I’ve seen this in so many games recently: a two-handed solo game is always the better way to play solo.

 

Cooperative

I”ll be honest, the cooperative play turned me around a little. I “leaked” the strategy that you must play your Matriarch as soon you get it (to avoid the double Matriarch) and we had a pretty good time playing cooperatively.

As a cooperative game, it’s pretty quick, and the game flows quickly if someone can explain everything. Having played at least ten times, I was able to shepherd Teresa and I through a game … and I had fun.

We didn’t get too unlucky on our deck, and generally we were able to me smart (when to play certain cards, when to eat trees). We were still forced to play our Matriarchs ASAP, but Teresa said she liked knowing that because it made it “easier” to think about.

The cooperative game was fun, we had to strategize together, and the game looks gorgeous. I had much more fun playing cooperatively than solo.

What I Liked

The Production: The production on this game, with the wooden meeples, the linen-finished cards, the gorgeous Vincent Dutraite art, and the quality of the everything really shines.

Specials: There are special one-time tokens that allow you to be “do something” special on your turn. The basic game allows you to start with 5 of them. I think without these tokens, you won’t feel like you can ever be smart, as you can be “stuck” with what you get. I will never play without these tokens.

Special Activations: I really like the decision space around the cards you play on the board. This allows you to feel clever! Do I need more elephants? Then I’ll take the +4 elephants! Does everyone need elephants? Then I’ll activate the +2 for everyone space! But I still need to connect the landmark sites, so maybe I’ll place a tile on a location JUST so I can connect locations! This was one of the most important parts of the game to make you feel smart. Taking this away from the 1-player game seems to neuter the game a little bit.

Diagonal: I really appreciate that diagonals are adjacent! You get so tired of games where everything has to be orthogonally adjacent! I feel like this opened up the decision space a little more!

What I Didn’t Like

Games Plays You. I hated that there is almost no mitigation of the double Matriarch. Can I choose not to draw? Can we distribute the matriarchs and/or Lions over parts? Nope. I sometimes feels like the game just is playing me because you pretty much forced to play the Matriarch when you get it.

Too random. It’s too easy to lose because of the way the deck is laid-out. Strictly speaking, you can lose at the end of your first turn if you draw two double Matriarchs in a row! Or sometimes you get the Lions and all clustered and the Lion and Lioness sneak up on the Matriarch and you lose! Your game is pretty much determined by how well you shuffle! The bad news cards can cluster and completely screw you …

The Rulebook:  The rulebook was great on the form factor, and the rules that were presented were presented clearly.  But the lack of some edge cases might really throw some gamers for a loop.  I have no problem moving forward if a rule is unclear, but some of my friends get stuck and can’t move forward.  I worry that this lack of specificity might turn off some gamers.

Conclusion

I am struggling with the score to give Tembo. I did have a good time playing once I figured out you always play a Matriarch as soon as you get it. But I still struggled with how the order of the deck can completely determine whether you can win or lose: the game can play you.

In the end, I am giving this a ranged score: [5.5/10 to 7/10]. I needed to capture that I like the game when the deck is fairly well behaved, but I wanted to give a warning that the game can be too random and frustrating. If I brought this certain groups and got a bad deck shuffle, they would never play it again … “oh my god, I had no choices! That was no fun! We just lost!” Other groups would just enjoy the setting and production and art … and the fact that it’s a little random is mitigated by the fact the the game is quick.

I think my friends Max and Cassidy would like this game (with a little strategy hint); they would like the cute and quick game herein. Unfortunately, Las Cruces friends would hate this (especially on a bad deck shuffle) because of the random nature.

Oh, and the given solo game is fine for learning the game, but I think it neuters the gameplay a little. If you want to play solo, play two-handed solo instead to enjoy the cleverness and choice that is still in the game (modulo the deck shuffle issues).

I don’t think Tembo would make my Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Laying/Tile-Placement Games. If I had to redo that list, it would need to be redone to make sure Mists Over Carcassone (see review here) were on it!