Killer Snails Review

Just look at the world around you
Right here on the ocean floor!
Such wonderful things surround you
What more is you lookin’ for?

(Altogether now!) Under the sea!
Under the – Wait, where’s Flounder…?

Killer Snails FLounder

Oh God! Who could have guessed that within these pretty, collectible shells are vicious Killer Snails? Well it turns out that to Dr Mandë Holford and the American Museum of Natural History, these are much more than just a pretty shell, or a vicious snail, for within the cocktail of poisons these creatures produce is a bountiful source of new medicines. This you’ll get to learn, along with numerous fun facts shared on all the cards as you play Killer Snails. You’ll take on the role of a scientist searching for these possible miracle cures, but your competitors will be hot on your heels.

The race is on to identify and collect the 3 sets (or ‘cabals’) of peptides that are randomly determined at the start of the game. Each time you feed a snail on a relevant prey it will produce a peptide and once you have collected a set on your snails you can extract them to complete one of the cabals. Be the first to complete all 3 and you’ll win! However, you’ll first need to contend with the game’s appalling graphic design.

Killer Snails Meeting

Let’s look past the word art font and the colour scheme that can only have been induced by spending too long around noxious chemicals. Let’s take a look at the iconography. Hold on. I’m just setting up my microscope. This symbol tells you this snail can only eat fish

Killer Snails Eats Fish

It’s not to be confused with this symbol that means the snail can eat anything.

Killer Snails Omnivore

 

To feed you compare the snail’s strength with the resistance of your intended prey and then discard cards for their attack value until the combined strength and attack is equal to the resistance. The attack is the tiny number in the top left corner of a card…

OK, maybe I’m making too big a thing of this. But when you’re straining across the table trying to read the tiny font on the prey cards to see what they do and whether they are worth stealing from your opponent, or realising you’ve picked up the wrong peptide because the colours look so similar, you’ll understand the importance of good graphic design too.

Visual appeal is important, but I don’t feel it is as important as good gameplay, and Killer Snails at least offers up some opportunities here. Take the peptide cabals you’re attempting to match: they are initially secret and need to be identified. Hidden information and deduction is an interesting challenge! There are numerous ways of gathering this information.

Killer Snails Kabals

The main way is by eating. As anyone who has eaten at a fish restaurant will tell you, feeding triggers special powers, and many of these will either let you peak at one of the objective peptides or permanently reveal them. There are also special action cards you can play that will do similar. This offers a potentially exciting deductive element to the gameplay and it works… for the first half of the game. But it doesn’t take long before every peptide is face up and known to everyone. In 2-players, this might be the half way point, at 4 its probably before most of you have solved your first cabal. The rest of the game is just a race to see who can collect the remaining peptides. It doesn’t offer the chance for bluffing, the risk of guessing or any actual deduction after the initial phase of the game. And this isn’t the only place the game falls short either.

Killer Snails claims to be a deck building game, and technically it is: you start with a deck of 10 cards, featuring a few snails and a pile of action cards from which you have a hand of 5. Then you have the opportunity to buy new cards each round from an Ascension/Star Realms style market to add to your deck. However, none of the options are particularly interesting. A large proportion of the cards you can buy are the same as the cards you start with in your deck. That’s rubbish! The joy of deck building is turning your deck from something that is barely able to do anything into a finely tuned engine that feels awesome. In Dominion my deck starts off as a donkey and (hopefully) ends up as a bullet train. In Killer Snails my deck starts off as a snail and ends up as a… slightly bigger snail?

Killer Snails Setup

The issue is that there are very few interesting combos to pull off. Instant cards can be played for their one shot ability, snails have slightly varying stats but they still at most end up sat on the table in front of you crying out to be fed. I like that the cards can be put to multiple uses (their main text use, to buy other cards, for their attack value) but those uses do not lead to clever combinations or emergent gameplay. The most interesting actions in the game are those on the prey cards but you only have limited control over the prey you can eat and again, they act independently of all the other elements in the game. You won’t even be buying that many cards. To buy a card you discard a number of cards equal to its cost, but you also need to discard cards in order to feed your snails, and you might actually want to play a card for its ability at some point. We’ve typically ended up buying around half a dozen cards each over the course of a game.

So what about feeding? This is the central element of the game, it’s how you collect the peptides you need to win. However, this is a purely mechanical process. It lacks any real, interesting decisions, a recurrent theme throughout this game. There is a hint of threat: snails that aren’t fed go into hibernation, and a hibernating snail will die on its next turn. But even though feeding to gain peptides requires some amount of effort (or at least, burns through your hand of cards) you can always feed on the “basic prey” card each player has available, so that threat kind of evaporates on closer inspection. At least, so long as your opponents don’t gang up on you with their attack cards. There is certainly scope for some vicious take that, but the result of which would be to dramatically extend the game and the last thing anyone I played with wanted to do was to make this game last longer.

Killer Snails Hand

 

I can see what the designers were trying to do with each element of this game, and there are no bad mechanisms, but none of it quite works. The hidden information doesn’t stay hidden nearly long enough. The deck building isn’t really building towards anything. There is rarely any opportunity to feel good about what you do or to make interesting decisions. I struggle to see whom the intended audience for this game is: regular gamers won’t get past the poorly implemented mechanisms, yet the combination of systems is a little too complex and fiddly to be aimed at families and kids, particularly non-gaming families, despite the educational slant. I have enjoyed learning a bit about these creatures and the scientific work that is going on to study these creatures and the medical opportunities that might arise from that. But that does not justify putting yourself through playing this game.

 

Rating: Dead in the water

 

This prototype copy of Killer Snails was provided to us by Jessica Ochoa Hendrix and the rest of Killer Snails team. Killer Snails is currently looking for funding on Kickstarter. Their campaign ends April 7th.

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