Buttery Goodness?

Wingspan has been one of the biggest recent board game hits -- both in the community at large and in my gaming circle. In it, designer Elizabeth Hargrave struck many clever balances. The core rules are fairly simple and easy to explain, while the interactions among the game's many cards add enough sophistication to satisfy more experienced gamers. Wingspan has risen to a lofty Top 20 position on BoardGameGeek, which I think is deserved.

I was quite interested to see what Hargrave created next... and now we have that in Mariposas, a game about monarch butterfly migrations across North America. Tiles are set up across a hex map of the continent. Players start with a single butterfly token in Mexico, but as you head out onto the map, you gather tokens to expand into later generations.

A goal condition for each of three seasons is selected, specifying different ways of scoring victory points: getting different butterflies to different colored hexes on the map, moving butterflies to the east coast, or migrating them north of a given line on the map. But at the end of the game, the big scoring happens for getting as many butterflies as you can back down to Mexico where it all began. Balancing these competing interests is the key to a winning score.

There are a lot of customizable aspects to this game that would ensure variety on repeat plays. Many more goal tiles than there are seasons in the game will give you different priorities for your movements. Special power tokens switch around too, rewarding you for collecting sets of tokens from the map.

But one thing that isn't likely to change much on replays: the game doesn't create much interaction between the players. A dozen or so cities on the map have scrambled tokens that are face down until the first butterfly arrives. Once the token is revealed, everyone knows the reward for going there. The player who revealed it gets a slight bonus, but it's so negligible that it's arguably not compensation for the time you spent moving toward an unknown city for something you personally might not value. And yet, this seems to be the only element in the game that cares at all about what anyone else is doing. Mariposas is otherwise a quite solitary affair where no opponent can ever really do anything to make you rethink your strategy on the (butter)fly.

There are a couple of unfortunate gaps in the rulebook, having to do with how new butterfly tokens (numbered by "generation") are spawned. Like Wingspan, Mariposas is a very thematic game, so the intent seems evident. But in a couple of places, a strict reading of the rulebook language would lead to an ambiguous or even contradictory conclusion to what that intent would seem to be. Look... I hate to be that guy that says a game's rulebook isn't clear. (It's impossible to anticipate every possible question that someone somewhere is going to have.) But I'm afraid this game's rulebook isn't entirely clear.

Perhaps the bar was set too high in my mind after Wingspan. Few designers ever have a game that rises so high in esteem in the gaming community, and fewer still have back-to-back hits. Certainly, Mariposas does have fun puzzle elements asking you to balance competing interests in an engaging way. It's also (commendably) a very different kind of game than Wingspan. But the comparative lack of player interaction here is quite a disappointment for me, that no amount of flexibility and variety in the game's core can fully overcome.

I give Mariposas a B-. I would try it some more if the opportunity arose. But I think it will be hard to want to do that in light of other games there on the same game shelf.