Designer: Chih-Fan Chen Publisher: Mizo Games
Distributed by: Taiwan Boardgame Design

Run, Animals, Run is , at face value, a resource collection game in which you guide a group of endangered animals through lush forests, gathering resources to fulfil their survival goals and be the first to score twenty points. But if you pay a little bit more attention there’s a darker message in there too. I suppose the fact that the box art carries the subtitle “Zoo of depression” is a bit of a giveaway.

This, as with many games from Taiwan and Singapore, is a game with a strong environmental theme. While you’re rushing to collect your resources you’re up against both the humans encroaching on the forest – in this case represented by flippable board tiles showing a lush green landscape on one side, and a grey building site on the other – and the ever-swinging scythe of death.

Run out of action cards (of which there are varying numbers depending on your chosen animal but, on average, five) before you complete your current resource goal and the only way to replenish the actions is to kill off one of your animals. And there’s every chance that you’ll be forced to do this, as the board is constantly changing throughout play, flipping from chlorophyll to concrete jungle with the roll of a dice. When the tiles flip, there are less available resources to be gathered with the possibility of this reducing further thanks to the addition of pesky cement cubes blocking off the resource spots.

You need to be methodical with your moves, and I guess that goes towards the narrative that this game is telling. You can’t hang about if you want to save the natural world. You need to make moves that count for something or you’ll find yourselves scrabbling for scraps in the dust.

And, as previously mentioned, the only way to refresh your available move set is to kill off one of your animals – some only start with two or three creatures so doing that is not something that should be taken lightly. This can lead to the game ending abruptly – whether it’s through the extinction of a species (loss of all your playing pieces) or filling up the animal graveyard on the back page of the rule book it’s an immediate end. Someone certainly can win by reaching the points total, but it’s more likely that your game will end suddenly as the last frog in the wild breathes its last.

There are a few issues with the game – the most notable of these being the fact that the flipped image of the building site has been printed incorrectly on the back of the jungle tiles – at least in the version I have played. As you flip the tiles they’re supposed to form an image of the building site but they will, in fact, form this image backwards and nothing will join together. It’s not a gamebreaker by any means, but it is a shame when it’s a mechanic that is also driving home a strong environmental message.