Llamas & Alpacas

• Designer: Rita Modl
• Publisher: Trefl
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Welcome to the world of breeding even-toed ungulates! And not just any even-toed ungulates, but very friendly alpacas and their slightly less friendly llama cousins! (Seriously, we don’t recommend getting bitten by a llama!) You have your own pasture, and you need to place your herds on it to score as many points as possible. Animals are happiest with similar animals, so pay attention to common traits in your herds that will help you overtake the other players in a fun gallop to victory.

In this game, each player starts with a board with a 3×3 grid on it, and 3 clovers and 3 carrots.  A market of 6 cards is dealt to the table – the cards can be either llamas or alpacas, they can have a bandana or hat (in 4 different colors), as well as a number in the upper corner.  Each player gets a random card to start the game, and this can be placed on any space on the 3×3 grid.

On a turn, the active player can either draft a card from the market or move one card on their grid to any other space.

If you buy a card from the market, you can take the card furthest from the deck for free.  If you want any other card, you must pay for all the cards you pass up – paying a carrot for an alpaca and a clover for a llama.  You can also pay a pair of treats as a wild card for the other treat.  Take the card you want and place it anywhere on your board.  If it has treats on it, you collect those treats, though you can never have more than 10 treats. Now push all cards to the left to fill in the holes and draw a new card from the deck in the space closest to the deck.

The new card is placed in an empty space in the 3×3 grid.  If you create a line of three cards in a horizontal or vertical line that share at least on characteristic, you will score.  The cards can all be of the same animal, have the same color accessory, or have the same number of be in a sequential run.  You score 2 points for each characteristic shared by the cards (max of 6 points).  Note that a white accessory is a wild card for any color and a star is a wild card for any number.

Well, at least that’s what the rules say (score 2/4/6 for 1/2/3 characteristics), and it says it in both the EN and DE rulesets.  However, the components for the game have scoring chips in 1/3/5 pt denominations, so I’m thinking the scoring is actually 1/3/5 for 1/2/3 characteristics, and that’s how we’ve played.  

If you make multiple lines, you can score them both – though you will have to denote a single value for each wild item.  Take scoring tokens from the supply and then discard all cards that are scored.

If you make a line of three cards that does not score; simply leave the cards on your board – you may be able to move cards later to cause a score.

If you choose to move a card, simply move a card from one space to any other empty space.  Again, if you trigger a scoring, follow the above procedure.

The game continues until a player has scored 18 or more points. Finish the current round so that all players have the same number of turns.  The player with the most points wins.  Ties are broken in favor of the player with the most treats left over.

My thoughts on the game

Llamas & Alpacas is a nice and easy game of drafting cards that best suit your needs.  Of course, there are definitely some cards that are better than others – and taking advantage of the board situation when you can will lead to victory.

You’d prefer to draft the cards and immediately place them in the right place; because while you can move cards around your board, it takes an entire turn to move a card – so it’s not without a cost.  That being said, I often like to move cards around to set up situations where I can score two lines at once.  If I can do this, I can score twice for only five cards (instead of 6), so there is a certain efficiency in doing things like that.

Also, the player is definitely incentivized to make lines with multiple matches given the increase in scoring for each successive matching criteria.  My best play so far is 8 points as one (a 6 point line for all three matching criteria and a 2 point line for matching animal types).  As the target score is 18 – this is nearly half of all the points you need to win the game!

Again there is an incongruence in the rules and the components, and we’ve been playing with the 1/3/5 pt scoring as those are the scoring chips we have. What is unclear is whether this should change the target score to end the game.  It probably doesn’t matter as the whole game only takes 15 minutes… but I hope to clarify the rules about scoring at some point.

So as you can see, the main decision when drawing cards is to decide when to take a less expensive card and when to spend your treats to get a highly coveted card.  There may even be times that you take a card solely for the number of treats on it – which you will then be able to use later to draw a card you want.  As it’s possible to make a match as easily as matching the animal types; there is no card which will be hard to score with; again, the bigger issue is how do you come up with a play that gets you a higher or more efficient score.

The art is fairly simple, and the cards are laid out in a way that it’s easy to tell all the needed information.  The game comes in a “standard Trefl” box – I say it’s standard as I picked up five games in the same sized box at Spiel 2023 – but man, this game could have fit in a much smaller box as it’s just scoring tokens and 80 cards; but for the sake of uniformity, I’ll admit that my OCD brain likes seeing all of the identical sized boxes all up in a line on my gaming shelf.

Llamas & Alpacas is a quick playing game which can be taught in a few minutes.  At its most basic level, it can be played by anyone; but there is definitely a bit of skill here in the planning; placing or moving cards into the right spots to get the highest scoring plays.  This has been a nice closer for our game group, and one that I will introduce to others during our holiday get togethers in the upcoming months.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale
• Neutral. John P
• Not for me…