It’s so hard to feel seen as a Cryptid these days. At least in Twisted Cryptids, you’ll navigate your love-hate relationship with humans who come in three groups, and earn your status as a true legend. As hikers, hunteres, and researchers move around the wilderness hoping to catch a glimpse, you must stage elaborate hoaxes, plant decoys, and lurk to build up your myth points. From Unstable Games and Ramy Badie, Twisted Cryptids is a lot of fun and entertaining if you enjoy card based games!
What’s in the box?
Twisted Cryptids comes neatly packed in the box. The base game has 4 tarot-sized Cryptids: Bigfoot, Mothman, Loveland Frog, and Jackalope. Each of the Cryptids also has a meeple, 12 hiding spots (three each), 36 sighting cards (9 for each Cryptid), 1 first player and 1 sinkhole token, 52 action cards, 12 event cards, 10 hidden trait cards, 12 double-sided myth tokens, 30 human tokens (10 each for researchers, hunters, and hikers), and a wilderness board with 6 areas.
As seen with Command of Nature, the box is very well produced and everything fits neatly. The artwork for the cards themselves is great, but for a company whose art is well known, the board itself was not as detailed as I had expected and would not lay flat after unfolding. Maybe after playing it more and more, the board will adjust? I also wish the labels for the areas had much more contrast, because it was hard to read which area was what.
The cards are fun but you don’t get to see the Sighting cards as much. The Action cards are seen every turn but only feature words like Lure or Scare and the human symbols. This would have been a great place to have more fun art of the humans moving or the cryptids.
Still, the pieces themselves are all well produced and the tokens all came out easily.
How’s it Play?
The goal of the game is to secure as much Myth (victory points) as you can over five rounds divided into four phases (dawn, day, dusk, and night). The meeple is used to track your spot on the score track. Players take three hiding location tokens and divides your personal Sighting cards into three stacks that represent potential sightings at the locations where humans are drawn to them.
Humans come as hunters, hikers, and resarchers, and shuffle around the different spots based on the Event cards during dawn and based on player Action cards during the day. Each player takes three turns during the day. At the end of each round (dusk), the location with the most humans has an encounter and anyone with hiding tokens at that location can score the top Sighting card of their stack. At night, the cryptids move their hiding spots and the player can discard cards to draw more.
So instead of moving the meeple, the humans are moved around and your job is to try to maximize your scoring potential by playing Action cards and moving the human around. However, since only one location scores each round, it’s possible some players won’t score at all.
Each player can also activate their Cryptid power once per round in place of an Action card like luring 2 humans, or attract a human and scare two humans.
Players also pick one of two drawn hidden trait cards, which have objectives for you to try to achieve like revealing real deals, hoaxes, or decoys.
There’s a nice short video from the creators so you can get a better look!
The verdict?
Overall, Twisted Cryptids is a lot of fun once you’ve played it a couple times and understand all the rules. On the one hand, I liked that the cards directed the humans instead of using dice or a different method since there were multiple actions on each card. If the player got to choose, I think it would be easy to put humans all in one place, assuming there weren’t limits or mechanics to stop that.
On the other hand, since the only way to move humans is the Action and Event cards, it really just depends on what is drawn and by who.
The cryptid powers are fun and you can try to just use your power every round to score as much as you can that way, and that might work well depending on the hidden trait card that you have. Or you can try to use only the cards, or do a mix of everything.
At $20 for the base game, if you’ve enjoyed playing something from Unstable Games, then this is definitely a great game to add to the collection. I know I’ll be pulling it out when I have two or three people to play with since that adds a level of chaos as everyone tries to score.
Images and review copy courtesy of Unstable Games
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