Australis

• Designer: Alessandro Zucchini & Leo Colovini
• Publisher: Kosmos
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 60 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/43Guqi5
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Stand your ground in the East Australian Current where you have to make your way as a sea turtle!  You have a chance of winning Australis only if you have a wide range of strategies. Choose the right dice cleverly to form growing schools of fish and settle corals on different coral reefs. At the end of each phase, you will compete with your dice in an exciting contest. Which of you will be the best in this ecosystem of incredible diversity?

The board is placed on the table and the dice are all placed on the matching colored areas in the bottom right.  The Advantage card deck is shuffled and six cards are dealt out onto the board. 

Each player gets their own sea board and takes all the bits in their color.  One food cube is placed in the left slot of the food track on their sea board, and the other three are placed onto the sea current track on the main board.   The starting player places their scoring marker and their turtle marker on the initial spaces of the score track and sea current track respectively.  In turn order, each player places their corresponding tokens on the next available space.  The gold and silver competition tiles are placed in the bottom left corner.

The game has five rounds, each having three phases

A] Dice Selection and Dice Action – choose any die from the board and place it on your player board.  This happens in turn order and each player will take this action four times (one die will be left unchosen).  If you have an advantage card that corresponds to the die you chose, you can use that advantage as well.  The different colored dice have different actions:

• Blue – Move your turtle forward on the sea current. If you end on an occupied space, keep going forward until you get to an empty space. If you reach or pass a space with a food cube on it, take that food cube and place it on the food track on your sea board.
• Red – Take the start token for the next turn
• Purple – place one coral piece of the reef matching the number shown on the die or any lower numbered one

• White – for each circle showing, score a point. For each rectangle showing, take an advantage card: either use immediately and discard OR place near your board and use it for the rest of the game. You can only have 3 cards in any of the five advantage slots, and you may not have exact duplicates
• Yellow – score points and/or catch fish

B] Score for Coral, Fish, Turtles

• Coral Reefs – scored in ascending order. The player with the most corals in that reef score points; for reefs 5 to 8, second place also scores points.  Ties broken in favor of the player whose turtle is further along the sea current track
• Schools of Fish – Score points for fish collected this round; you are limited by the number of food cubes on your board.  
• Sea Turtles – score points as noted on the space where your turtle is on the track

C] The Dice Competition

• This uses the blue, purple and red dice collected during the round (the white and yellow dice can just be returned to their area on the board).  All players roll their dice, apply and advantages they have, and then announce the lowest number seen on any of their dice.  All dice that match the lowest announced number are returned to the game board.  All players reroll all remaining dice and repeat the process until one player is left.  The winner can choose to take either the gold competition tile or the silver competition tile (with a bonus grey food cube in the first three rounds).

All the dice are now returned to the board and then re-rolled.  The advantage card market is wiped and a new set of six advantage cards is revealed.   The first player token is given to whomever chose the red die in the previous round.  If no one took the red die, the player furthest back on the sea current track goes first.

Continue until five rounds are completed. Players each score one point for every coral piece on a reef and one point goes to the player who would have received the start player token.  Then, each player reveals any competition tiles they have gained and scores those points as well.  As with all other ties in this game, ties are broken in favor of the player further ahead on the sea current track on the board.

My thoughts on the game  

Australis is a game all about dice, and rolling them well.  Sure, there’s obviously more to it than that – but in the end, it’s a game where you’ll win if you roll well…  There are a lot of different things going on in the game though – there’s some set collection, some engine building, some area majority, and even a little bit of a race mechanic going on the EAC track… so it’s not just all about the dice.  But, trust me, that’s what people remember about the game.

Players have a lot to consider each round. You will choose a die each turn, keeping in mind both the action you get to take immediately as well as the potential value for the roll-off.  Blue, purple and yellow all help you score points.  Red gives you initiative for the next round.  The white die helps you draw cards for a bit of engine building.   If you can pair the right advantage cards together, you might end up with a decent strategy for picking dice.

Despite all the different things going on, the rules are honestly quite simple to teach and I have taught this to gaming neophytes without issue.  Turns move along fairly quickly, and I can see this being a suitable game both complexity wise and length wise for families and casual gamers. 

As I mentioned earlier, there are quite a number of different game mechanics used in Australis, but the game feels a bit of a jumble; to my mind, these components don’t gel together into a single gameplan.  It’s just a collection of bits each round, punctuated by the luck-fest of the roll off.   If it was just the mini-game collection, I’d probably be fine with the game as a whole, but when my strategic plan relies upon my dice rolling luck, that moves the game closer to the not-for-me territory.  Of course, YMMV, and if you prefer that round ending (or like that sort of variance), this could be one for you to try.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Eric M
• Neutral.  Dale Y
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/43Guqi5