Spectacular
In Spectacular, each player creates a park to preserve endangered and vulnerable animals. Your job is to configure your park to optimally care for these species. Welcome new animals, feed them properly, promote breeding, expand each habitat, and build watchtowers for visitors to observe the snow leopard, the pangolin, and other spectacular animals.
Spectacular provides simultaneous play and ensures interaction between the players, as your opponents’ decisions will affect which tiles and dice are available for you. The game also comes with asymmetric player boards (on their backs). The game offers simple rules, quick set-up, short playing time, engaging puzzles, and can be played by 1 to 6 players with little downtime, even with higher player count.
During the game, you select animal tiles and dice, where the dice represent food for the animals. The color of the dice must match the habitat colour of the animal tiles. Each turn provides crucial decision-making where you need to consider whether to draft a die of a certain value or ensure an animal tile which may not be available again. At game end, for each area of connected tiles of the same habitat, you score points for the sum of your dice of that colour.
Over the course of the game, you will also build watchtowers, which will score you points for all three dice adjacent to them. You also aim to collect as many different species as possible, with increasing points awarded for greater variety. Finally, the player with the most points wins the game!
After a few plays, you may challenge yourself by playing with three (of 18) mission tiles. While they offer the potential for a higher score, they also raise the difficulty level of the puzzle.