Mariposas
Every spring, millions of monarch butterflies leave Mexico to spread out across eastern North America. Every fall, millions fly back to Mexico. However, no single butterfly ever makes the round trip.
Mariposas is a game of movement and set collection that lets players be part of this amazing journey.
Mariposas is played in three seasons. In general, your butterflies try to head north in spring, spread out in summer, and return south in fall. The end of each season brings a scoring round, and at the end of fall, the player with the most successful family of butterflies — i.e., the most victory points — wins the game.
Reviews and Articles About Mariposas
Editor reviews
Beautiful butterfly, or hairy caterpillar?
What I’ve been hearing is that publishers shifted gears due to the pandemic. They’ve been putting the breaks on development of “gamer’s games” and big multiplayer games, and accelerating development on their family and 2-player games. So expect to see a lot of family and 2-player games announced this GenCon, and hitting the shelves in Q4 2020 and Q1 2021. Also expect release date delays on other types of games previously announced if they weren’t already in the production pipeline back in March.
You always seem to have a "stick with the one-in-the-hand or risk going for the two-in-the-bush" situation. Do you move butterflies over to the the score zone as quickly as possible so they score at the end of the season, or risk moving a bit slower to be able to gather flowers (food) so you can spawn more butterflies. More butterflies in the score zone means more points, but if you dilly-dally too long, none of them will end up making it to the score zone in time.
This is gong to sound like an odd comparison, but it tickles the same bit of my brains that Merchant of Venus does.
It's on "limited time deal" on Amazon today. Finally ordered mine.
But seriously, we're going to come out of this and see each other's shelves and probably collectively say, "Yeah, we all really went through some shit, didn't we?"
I was thinking exactly that as I looked over my birthday board game loot. However, Euros have come a long way from drab, procedural, cube squashers. Zoe played Quacks for the first time on Tuesday. As she put her hand in her bag for a critical draw she said, "OMG. My heart is pounding. Is this what gambling feels like?" I think any game that can get your heart rate up is a good game.
Msample wrote: Interesting that the designer went with someone other than Stonemaier, who published Wingspan.
I'm guessing AEG could offer her more money/larger print run/wider distribution with no Kickstarter/distribution gamesmanship mucking about.
I agree with everything you said. It is very rules light and super easy to learn to play. It gets challenging and mathy when you get into “must best my highest score.” My brain immediately went to calculating the average points of movement per game, and the costs and promises of spawning a 4 butterfly in the south positioned so that is could get home and score at end game vs spawning them in the north for 3 points each and no hope of getting it home.
I agree that people who love Wingspan may be disappointed with Mariposas. On the other hand, folks that didn’t care for Wingspam may find Mariposas fascinating.
You may end up being the only one who wants to play it with me. Francie, Al and Zoe were all “meh” on it.
I think it's going to be something that is very polarizing, and honestly, I love seeing that right now. I've been looking at posts about an upcoming KS game where there's this idea that games need to offer something for everyone. Like people make demands nowadays and I am so not on board with that. Even if I don't end up liking a game, I find it charming when a designers really commits to a weird, unique idea and and doesn't care about the game pleasing the widest audience as possible in order to make the game they wanted to make. That is clearly the case here and good on Elizabeth and AEG for going for it.
Josh Look wrote: Like people make demands nowadays and I am so not on board with that.
This.
“If this game had ( insert whiney demand for shit like dedicated solo bot, minis, playmates, etc) I’d buy it”.
I like how Mark Herman tells people not to buy a game if he thinks they won’t like it, rather than dealing with their entitled whining after the fact.
"It's a game about social interactions with other people."
"Oh, so now you're PREJUDICED against solo gamers! Guess I can ignore anything this company does for the rest of time!"
(Kickstarter from same company is announced.)
"But will there be SOLO MODE?!!"