Tembo

• Designers: Dan Halstad, Daniel Skjold Pedersen, Mads Floe, Asger Harding Granerud 
• Publisher: The Op Games / Sidekick Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30-45 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4s8Pzet
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

TEMBO is the Swahili word for elephant. In this cooperative game, you lead a herd of elephants on a thrilling journey of survival across the savanna. Reaching your destination is the only way to win – yet the path is full of challenges. You will need to search out food and water, navigate shifting terrain, and avoid the fierce lions that roam the land.  On your turn, play a card to either expand the savanna or move the herd forward across it. Each card has dual uses, and your position at the table determines how you can play it, creating a multi-layered puzzle for you and your team to solve. Play continues until the herd reaches its destination—or until you lose by going hungry, running out of time in the deck, or being caught by the lions. No two journeys are ever the same. Each game offers new challenges, demanding careful planning and constant communication to guide your herd safely to victory.

Set up the game by choosing a journey tile and then setting up the savanna boards as shown on the journey tile. Place the Start board, destination board, Lioness and Lion meeples also as shown.  Each player gets their own player board with 3 Elephants on it (rested). The rest of the player’s elephants are off to the side (tired).  The Matriarch token is placed on the start board, and the Energy token is placed on the starting space matching the player count.

The 69 cards are separated into the five decks (each has its own back).  Players each get 3 cards from the starting deck; the rest of this deck is discarded. The main deck is made by placing the I, II and III decks on top of each other in order.  Finally, choose the difficulty level of the game by adding 0-5 support cards to the top of the deck as well as a matching number of support tokens to the side of the board.  The Tree are all placed upright next to the board.  A start player is chosen.

On a turn, the player has three action choices: Build Savanna, Place Elephants, play Matriarch card(s).  Each of these actions uses a card from the player’s hand.

Build Savanna – place a card from your hand onto an empty space on the Savanna boards. You cannot cover up a previously played card nor can you cover a landmark area.  Most cards have a straight arrow in the upper left; these cards must always be played so that this arrow is pointing directly away from the player.  Cards with a rotated arrow can be rotated in any direction when placed.  Each valid space to play a card has an action printed on it; this action is resolved when covered by a card in the Build Savanna action.

Place Elephants – play a card from your hand and then place Rested Elephants from your player board to match the exact pattern on the card.  Again, the arrow on the card determines the orientation of the card.  The first elephant placed must be adjacent (orthogonally or diagonally) to a previously placed elephant or the Matriarch.  Alternatively, a card can be played and the player places a single elephant in a legal spot.   Open savanna spaces can hold a single Elephant.  Water spaces grant you 3 rested elephants onto your player board.  Rough terrain spots require you place 2 Rested elephants for each Rough terrain spot.  If a tree is complete (both spots are filled with elephants), place the matching Tree standee on its side and gain the energy shown.  Each Savanna board has a Landscape area; if all of the purple spaces are filled with Elephants, the matching Landmark standee is placed upright near the board to show that this site has been successfully visited.

Play Matriarch Card(s) – there are 9 Matriarch cards in the main deck. When you play this card, you pick up the Matriarch and move it to any legal space (i.e. adjacent to any other Elephant on the board), gaining any water bonus and ignoring any Rough Terrain penalty.  All players now pick up the Elephants placed on the Savanna board.  All the Trees are stood upright.  Finally, lose 2 Energy (seen on the Start board).  If you ever draw a Second Matriarch card into your hand, you must immediately play both cards, performing all the usual steps but losing 5 energy points instead of 2.

Support Tokens:  At any time on your turn, a player can use an available Support Token – each one can be converted into: +1 energy, +2 rested elephants, allow you to rotate your card or ignore the Rough Terrain Penalty.  

After you resolve your action, draw back up to 3 cards.  If you have 2 Matriarch Cards in your hand, you must immediately perform the Double Matriarch action as above. If you draw a Lion card, you immediately play it, doing the action for the Lioness first, and then the Lion.  After these extra actions are resolved, draw back up to 3 cards in hand, repeating the immediate actions if the appropriate cards are drawn.

Lion Cards – Lions start lying down.  If they are activated and are lying down, they simply stand up.  Lions do not occupy a space on the board but rather the entire Savanna board they are on.  If a Lion is already standing, it now moves towards the closest elephant by the shortest route; if there is a tie on route, use the Lion Compass to determine which direction the Lion moves.  If the Lion is on a tile that already has Elephants, it does not move.  Now, all player Elephants in an area with a standing Lion are removed (the Matriarch is never removed).  Further, if the Lion is on the same tile as the Matriarch, all players remove 1 Rested elephant from the game.  If the do not have any Rested Elephants, they then remove a Tired Elephant.  If any Elephants are removed, the Lion lies down; otherwise it remains standing.  The Lioness completes her entire action and then the Lion completes his.

The Players win if they are able to visit all 6 Landmarks and then place elephants on both purple spaces on the Destination board.  Players lose if any loss condition occurs:

• Both Lions are on the same board as the Matriarch
• The Energy Token reaches zero
• There are no cards left in the Draw Deck when someone needs a card
• Any player has no Elephants left in the game

For more complicated games, there are also Event tiles that can be added to the game, with events being triggered when Matriarch cards are played.

My thoughts on the game

Tembo is a surprisingly challenging game – there is a lot for the group to think and talk about while endeavoring to move the elephants across the board!  At first, the group needs to figure out the general path they want to take and then place tiles to support that plan.  It will help to have conveniently placed trees in order to generate energy.  Additionally, the bonuses you gain from placing the tile can help jumpstart the game.  Of course, you need to be careful about just how quickly you place tiles because you’ll want to save some of those bonuses for later in the game when you’ll need them!

As the game begins, there isn’t much threat from the Lioness and Lion as they generally start further away.  But with each successive Lion card drawn, they will inexorably close in on your herd of Elephants.  There is a fine bit of management here trying to lure one or both away from the bulk of the herd.  Sometimes it’s best to place a sacrificial elephant on a tile by itself to attract one or both of the predators.  Remember that you’ll lose the game if both predators end up on the same board as your Matriarch.  Also, as the predators will remove all the Elephants on their Savanna board, you really don’t want them coming into the bulk of your community.  A sacrifice works nicely as you hopefully only lose one or two elephants, and then you also cause the predator to lie down for a turn, giving you a bit of a reprieve; and hopefully getting the predators off cycle so that it’s harder for them to converge on the Matriarch’s space.

The game cycles around the Matriarch cards, and there is a really nice push your luck element to them.  You can definitely count the Matriarch cards in each section of the deck to help calculate your risk, but the penalties for ending up with two of them in your hand at once are high.  The trick for our group is figuring out when it’s best to play a Matriarch to reset the herd and when it’s best to push our luck and make a different play, simply hoping to not draw a second one into the hand of the player who already has one.

There are definitely times when it makes sense to play a Matriarch card early – especially if there is some danger of the herd being eaten by a likely Lion card to be drawn!  You can also take advantage of moving the Matriarch, possibly out of danger but also possibly to a space where you get a water bonus or to allow for a quick change of direction.  If you time it right, you can also reset the trees to gain more energy back.  As you’ll lose either 2 or 5 energy with each Matriarch play, you’ll have to constantly be picking up energy by claiming the tree spaces.

The Support Tokens are a great way to modify the difficulty; each one serves as a wildcard to get you out of a jam, and you simply have fewer of them as you make the game more difficult.  In our group, we’ve yet to stray any lower than 4 support tokens at the start of the game (max is 5) – but hopefully we’ll get better at the game as we keep playing it!

Tembo is a challenging cooperative game where the players have to figure out a plan to best use their cards/elephants as well as managing the probabilities of the deck draw.  It has been an enjoyable game at 3 and 4 player count, and the game has ways to ramp up the difficulty should you need that.  You can also add in Event tiles to change each round up – but until we feel like we’ve conquered the base game, those Event tiles will remain in the box around here…

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

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

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4s8Pzet