The Wolves.

The Wolves came out at the tail end (pun intended) of 2022, and I didn’t get to play it until after I’d filed my best-of-the-year list, but I have to say that’s a whiff on my part. This game is really good, and one of the better pure area control games I’ve tried in a while. It scratches the RISK itch, with very simple rules and surprisingly fast play times.

In the Wolves, players will control a small pack of wolves on a variable board with five terrain types, and compete to grow their pack by converting lone wolves and other players’ wolves, building dens and lairs, and hunting other animals. Each region scores once during the game, with points going to the player with the most tokens on the region.

The big twist in the Wolves is how you choose your actions. Each player has a set of six two-sided terrain tiles, and must flip one to three tiles of a matching type to take an action. Moving wolves requires flipping one tile; building or upgrading dens and “howling” to convert lone wolves requires two; “dominating” an opponent’s wolf or den requires three. Each player has one terrain tile that shows the same type on both sides, which is unique to them and is the only terrain they can show on three tiles at once. You get two actions per turn, so you need to consider the second action when choosing your first, because your options are limited to what’s showing on your tiles. There are bonus tokens available to make some of this easier, however – bonus action tokens and wild terrain tokens – which you can gain by completing certain actions enough times to gain a token.

Each player starts the game with two alpha wolves and four regular (beta?) wolves. Alpha wolves can build dens and upgrade them to lairs; they can also howl. Regular wolves are just sort of around. You can dominate another player’s wolf, but not an alpha wolf; the only way to protect a regular wolf is to put it together with another wolf of either type or on a space with a den/lair. At the beginning of the game, each board piece has a pair of “lone wolves” on it that are up for grabs – any player can “howl” to replace that lone wolf token with a wolf of their own.

The player boards start out with eight additional wolves, two of which are alphas; eight additional dens; and four lairs on them. When you howl, build, upgrade, or dominate, you take the appropriate piece from your board, and in many cases reveal points, a bonus token, or both. The more you take a specific action, the greater the benefits. Hunting is a little different, as it’s a passive action – if you get any three wolves into three spaces adjacent to an animal token, you take it and place it on your board, gaining a wild terrain token as a bonus.

Regions have crescent, half, or full moon tokens on them (or none at all), indicating when they’ll score and their point values, which are 4, 6, and 8 for the players with the most control, respectively. Every token is worth 1 for calculating control, except lairs, which are worth 3. The player in second place in any region gets half the points of the first-place player. The crescents score first, after which they have no area control value; the full moons score last, which triggers the end of the game.

The Wolves really sings with three to five players. There’s a ton of player interaction, a great amount of strategizing involved in manipulating your terrain tiles, and no luck or randomness aside from the initial setup. I especially love the aspect of getting the points from a crescent or half moon region, then trying to move your wolves en masse somewhere else where they’ll matter for scoring. It’s a slow rush, as the saying goes. The designers, one of whom previously designed Merchants of Magick and Chomp, didn’t load the game up with too many pieces or too many actions; the rulebook isn’t that short, but you could probably write all the rules up on one regular-sized piece of paper. It’s just complex enough to be interesting, but it’s a quick teach, and play times are about an hour. There is a two-player variant, with neutral wolves taking up space on the board, and different scoring for hunts, but I don’t love it. I think the game needs the additional players to create more interaction and chaos, while the neutral player is just sitting there, not taking actions like an automa player might. If you can regularly get 3 or more players, though, and you like this sort of push-pull map game, I highly recommend it.