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Board game review & gameplay of: Cryptid

  • 7/10
  • 14+
  • 2 players
  • 20-40 minutes

Gameplay

In Cryptid: Urban Legends you play either as the Cryptid, hiding away, trying to remove all evidence of existence; or you play as the scientist, trying to localize the Cryptid.

Starting with 3 location tiles with 1 black counter in the middle, players go back and forth moving sensors to the other side of the row. On a turn, players get to pick 1 of 3 actions:

A. play a wildcard: 

B. draw 2 cards from your deck (hand limit of 4)

C. Play a card: Via the actions Split, Align and Shuffle players move the sensor cubes to the other side of the row.

Once all sensors are moved to the other side, the Crypted gets to name a feature, which consists of either a color or a number condition. Once a city tile fulfills a condition, the cryptid gets a presence token on that city tile.

After this, if the Cyptid still has 2 or more presence tokens after removing the one from the inactive side, 2 new city tiles are added.

The game ends in one of 3 ways; 

- When location tiles are emptied, in this case the player with the most red tiles

- When the Cryptid has presence counters of the outer tiles when there are 7 tiles in play

- When there is 1 or 0 presence counters, the scientist wins!

Thoughts

👍 I love the component quality Osprey Games delivers. Everything looks great and fits in the small box perfectly. The illustrations are also very nice!

👍 When we started to get it, we started liking this cat and mouse-like game with some moving back and forth action. It feels a bit like chess or onitama.

👍➖ At first I thought it would be more like the first cryptid game, but I find there is not much similarity other than the theme.

➖ The game felt a bit difficult at the start and a bit dry maybe even. I didn't quite understand the rules that easily.

➖ I know a lot of people will like this, but it feels a bot too brainburny for me.

7/10

A copy of this game was provided to me by Osprey Games for the purpose of writing this review. My opinion however remains my own.

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