I preordered this off the cover art alone before I’d even read the rulebook, which is not something I usually admit to doing, and then spent the first play worried I’d been suckered by presentation. I hadn’t been. The rules teach in about four minutes, take a token, stack it on your board, if a habitat card’s pattern completes you claim it, and somewhere around the third round the puzzle underneath that simplicity starts pushing back in a way that’s genuinely satisfying to untangle.

Setup and teardown is where this one actually earns its spot on a weeknight, everything nests into its own tray, no baggie shuffle, and I can have it on the table in under three minutes, which matters more to me most weeks than raw depth does. The player boards are small and the piece stacking gets genuinely awkward once you’re four or five levels tall, wobbling if the table gets bumped, which is a real ergonomics gripe and not just me being clumsy. I’ve seen the comparison to Cascadia and Azul everywhere and it’s fair, it sits in that same lane, but the animal cards add a layer of secondary scoring that Azul never had and Cascadia does in a looser way.

The knock I keep hearing, and mostly agree with, is that it’s quiet to the point of multiplayer solitaire, everyone’s building their own board and nobody’s really interacting, so this isn’t the pick if your table wants trash talk. But for a fast, tactile puzzle that looks incredible doing it, four stars, and it’s become my go-to when someone new to the hobby needs an on-ramp that doesn’t feel like homework.