Chomp

• Designer: Clarence Simpson
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 8+
• Time 20 minutes
• Played with copy acquired from a friend

From the publisher: “The era of the dinosaurs is here! Your goal in Chomp is to form herds of dinos and make sure they are all fed. Herbivores and carnivores both need food sources, but if the carnies are not properly fed, they don’t mind chomping an herbie to fill their bellies!

Gameplay involves dual rows of goal tiles and dino tiles, and each turn players select one tile to add to their personal arrangement. Goal tiles stay off to the side for endgame scoring, and dino tiles are arranged in front of each player. Dino tiles include three sizes each of herbivores and carnivores. Each tile must overlap previous ones, either on top of a quarter tile, half tile, or even a whole tile, ensuring that any covered dinos are completely hidden.  Adjacent dinos of the same species form herds, which will eat together if connected to a single food source — or die together if they are unfed, adjacent to a tar pit, or next to an otherwise unfed carnivore! At the end of the game, each living and fed dino scores 1-3 points depending on its size, and the player with the highest score wins.”

The bulk of the game is found of 36 double sided cards – one side showing a Goal and the other showing varied landscapes.  To set up the game, make a deck of 9 cards per player, shuffle them, and then lay out the initial market with a row of 3 cards goal side up, and a row beneath that of 3 cards landscape side up.   Each player is dealt a random land card to the table in front of them.

On a turn, a player must take a card from the display.  This will continue until the entire deck is collected and each player has gained 8 cards.  You may not flip over the card your draw; goals will always be goals, land will always be land.  The two options:

Take a goal card – place this near your landmass. It will score points based if your land area meets the criteria on the goal card.  Draw the top card from the deck and place it in the empty space.

Take a land card – you add this to your existing landmass – it must overlap some part of another card – either one-quarter, one-half, or the area of the entire card.  Land cards may be rotated how you like when you place them.  You may not overlap part of a large animal.  To replace the empty space in the market, flip the goal card above it over into the bottom row as a new land card, and then draw the top card of the deck into the goal spot.

As you place land cards, you might generate a herd – this is a contiguous area of the exact same dino type.  Herds have special rules considering adjacencies – if any member of a herd is adjacent to something, then all the dinos in that herd are considered adjacent to that thing.

Some cards have small eggs on them.  When you place such a card, if you have an empty nest, you may place an egg in that nest.

When all players have drawn 8 cards, the game is complete and everyone takes note of their score.  A dry-erase scoreboard is provided to make this easy.  Before you score, you must first see which dinosaurs survive.

• Any dino adjacent to a tar pit dies.
• Carnivores need to eat. If the are adjacent to a meat space, they are content. Otherwise, they will eat all adjacent herbivore/herbivore herds of the same size or smaller.  If it cannot eat, the carnivore dies.
• Herbivores then eat. If still alive, herbivores must be adjacent to a plant square to be fed. If they cannot feed, they die.

Now, you can score the remaining living dinos.

• Every surviving large dinosaur scores 3 points
• Every surviving medium dinosaur scores 2 points
• Every surviving small dinosaur scores 1 point
• Any egg in a nest is worth 2 points
• Score each collected goal cards based on the criteria on the card

The player with the most points wins.  Ties broken in favor of the largest living herd.

There is also a nice solo version – which uses a subset of the deck, 21 of the 36 cards.  This deck is shuffled and you start with 2 goals and 1 land tile.  The market is then set up as usual.  The game plays almost the same – the main difference is that each time you draw a goal tile, you discard the land beneath it, and then resupply the market with two new cards from the deck.  Additionally, unlike the multiplayer game which only has 8 rounds, you get to draw 9 cards in the solo version (so that you have 12 total cards).  When you are done, you compare your score to a chart in the rules to see how you did, 36 points being the threshold for the highest category.

My thoughts on the game

Chomp is a delightful little tile laying game that fits a lot of action in a small box.  You are asked to make the most of your nine card dominion.  It’s not easy laying out the cards in a way to give yourself maximal scoring opportunities, and you also have to try to decide when you are going to take a goal card or two.  While you don’t necessarily need any goal cards at all – you could simply score points from surviving dinosaurs; some goal cards can payoff many more points than any configuration found on a land tile. 

While drafting, you should keep an eye on what your forward neighbor is collecting or what goals they have already drafted.  If all other things are equal, you could easily try to take a card that has their desired features on it.  Sometimes this isn’t possible, but it’s something to keep in mind.

I prefer to take a goal card early if I can see that points can be scored.  Having the goal card also helps give me some direction towards other useful cards in the drafting process.  The downside is that, of course, everyone else now knows what you might be looking for, and they might snake them from you.  Taking more than 2 goals seems to be dicey as you simply don’t get enough land cards to generate enough scoring power.  Or at least that’s what my experience has shown so far.

As you are laying land cards down, you also always need to remember that if your area is going to expand, you’ll have to cover up at least a quarter of an existing card each time.  Therefore, it rarely pays to have a completely perfect land area mid-game because you will still be expanding things.  It’s often OK to leave a carnivore next to your huge herbivore herd early on because you still will have time to drop down a meat source later – or maybe get a tar pit to be adjacent to the carnivore to save your little plant eaters.

Is the game perfect?  Well, not exactly.  In a 4p game, you will play all the cards in the box, and I’ll admit that this leaves me a little unsatisfied as there is a distinct turn order advantage due to the selection of cards available for the final turn.  The first player in turn order will have the best set of options in front of them, and will always have at least one goal card to choose from.  Each later player has one less freedom of choice, and the poor last player just gets whatever is left, and I can nearly guarantee you that this card will have a tar pit on it if possible.  The developer in me hates this; and in a 3p game, we just play with the full deck and simply count rounds so that all players have 8 turns and each has the same sort of choices available to them in each turn.  This cannot be done in the 4p game as you actually use every card, so there are no extras to be added to the deck.  (In any non-4 player version, I just set aside a stack of tokens equal to the number of rounds and discard one each time the start player picks.)  

For what it’s worth, after writing this review a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to play the game with “normies” – that is, friends who don’t normally play games.  They took to the game quickly and really learned the rules in a short amount of time.  None of them were bothered at all by the final round, and I’m guessing that this sort of casual player is the real target audience of this allplay series of games, and as such, it’s likely not going to be an issue for most people.

This quibble aside, everything else about the game is pleasing. I like the puzzle of figuring out how to stack the land cards on top of each other.  I like having to weigh my options of taking a land card versus taking a goal card.  I like the fact it has a nice solo version – in fact, I have played it more solo than I have multiplayer now.  And I definitely love the fact in comes in such a small box.  For 1-3p, this is a definite keeper, and a game I’d happily introduce to just about anyone.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Dale (1-3p)
• I like it.
• Neutral. Dale (4p)
• Not for me…