Base price: $25.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: 20 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Logged plays: 3
Full disclosure: A review copy of Loco Momo was provided by Flat River Games / Wonderful World Board Games.
I have a soft spot for games about photography, even if they’re silly. I think that’s just my damage from doing photography for so long, but here we are, nevertheless. Thankfully, it’s a relatively mid-popular theme, so you’ll see it every now and then with games like Wind the Film! or Picture Perfect or this one, Loco Momo. Does this one really have that much to do with photography? Not really, but it’s a fun theme so I’m letting it slide. Plus, I’m writing this at 3AM and it’s alarmingly easy to rationalize things at that hour. We abide. Either way, before I fall asleep, let’s dive right in!
In Loco Momo, the animals of the forest have found an old-timey camera! They all want to keep it, so they agree that the best photographer will be able to do so. Unfortunately, most of the animals are not prepared for a big group photo, so you’ll have to round them up and get them to stay pretty still if you want that prize. Easier said than done, I suppose. So get them to stack up and say cheese so that you can get the best photos. Will you be the ultimate shutterbug?
Contents
Setup
Each player starts off by getting a picture board:
And then, set the board in the center of the table:
If you’re playing with the mini expansions, you can use the A or B tiles:
Shuffle the animal tiles, and fill each of the four spots on the board with four tokens:
Place the sun token on the 1 space on the round tracker, and you should be ready to start!
Gameplay
This one’s pretty straightforward. Each round, you draft and place tokens from the main board on your board, and you’ll ultimately get points for them. That’s nice.
On your turn, pick any single token from any one of the four spots. Based on the token you pick, it resolves:
- Rabbit: Move the token one area clockwise and then take every token of the same color in that area.
- Leopard: Move the token one area counterclockwise and then take every token of the same color in that area.
- Eagle: Move the token diagonally and then take every token of the same color in that area.
- Bear: The bear doesn’t move at all! Collect all the tokens of the same color in that area.
- Duck: The duck is the most complicated. Classic ducks. This duck moves clockwise to the next available area with a duck (of any color).
Regardless, collect the tokens you’ve taken and place them on your board. You can place them in any row, but you have to fill the spaces from left to right (and you don’t have to place all the tokens in the same row). Once you’ve done that, the next player gets to go. At the end of a round, advance the sun marker by one.
After six rounds, the game ends! Players tally their scores row by row, with one fun bonus:
- Each row or column of the same color earns you 5 points.
Then, score from top to bottom:
- First row: score 4 points if the token matches the pair of tokens below. Note that this means all three have to match.
- Second and third rows: score 3 points if the tokens in this column match.
- Fourth row: score 1 / 2 / 5 / 9 / 14 points if there are 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 of the same token. Note that this means you can have multiple groups.
- Fifth row: score 1 / 2 / 5 / 9 / 14 points if there are 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 different tokens.
The player with the most points wins!
If you want to do either expansion, you can do that! Expansion A gives you two things that you want to include as little as possible, and Expansion B gives you a bonus if the pictured tile is in the top right of your player board.
Player Count Differences
There aren’t a ton of differences, just because so much of what you do depends on what tokens are available where at any given time. Even the duck can give you a lot of option just because it moves so far when you take it before you collect the other tokens. More players essentially turns the game into Entropy City; it can be difficult to get any planning done just because of where everything ends up between your turns. At two, though, you get a bit of planning and a bit of control. Sometimes a bit too much control; the areas can get a little stale between turns. That said, two or three players seems like a pretty stable spot. That’s what I would recommend.
Strategy
- Grabbing as many tokens as possible is usually a good plan. The more the merrier, just because it’s much easier to fill out your rows and columns and that’s how you score points. That said, don’t just take to take. If you do, you won’t be able to actually get a larger grouping together, which is how you get the big points.
- If you focus too quickly on the same row or the different row, you might have trouble placing the pairs. Every spot on the board is kind of nice because it’s a useful dumping ground for stuff that doesn’t fit in another zone. Even the top row is mostly a “it’s really great if you can place here, but not the end of the world if you can’t”, so play accordingly. You’ve got options. If you just keep trying to get all the red ducks, for instance, you might not be able to make useful pairs or place a duck in the “every animal needs to be different” row.
- Particularly, draining the supply of all the tokens of one type for the matching row can make it difficult to get that last one. Like I said, there are only so many tokens of each color. It’s about trying to make local optimizations to get the highest score, so you need to decide when the trade-off is worth it.
- Honestly, getting an entire row or column of a color is usually a pretty good idea. It’s worth a bunch of points in addition to the points you’d score regularly for placing there, so, try to match up your colors where you can!
- Taking a bunch of different colors, even if it’s a lot of tokens, may not be great. It’s not particularly cohesive, which, again, is how you build up the big combos. You really want those row / column bonuses, where you can.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- The art style is pleasant! I think the animals are pretty cute and, most importantly, visually distinct. It’s a bit more frustrating if I can’t tell them apart.
- I like this as another quick strategy game. You can really sit down and teach just about anyone this game pretty much instantly, which is awesome. It’s quick to pick up and teach and quick to play.
- There’s a good amount of strategic variety. I think drafting games do a good job of letting you have some overarching strategy while still keeping each individual game relatively unique.
- I appreciate how easy this is to set up, though. You just kind of shake up the bag and you’re mostly good to go. Even refilling isn’t too taxing.
- The expansions are relatively light touches, which is nice. You can add them or not but they’re just slightly different ways to play; they’re not going to completely upend what you know about the game.
Mehs
- The tokens are easy to mix in the bag but man, they’re tiny. They’re sometimes hard to control on the board just because they’re so small, but it is nice to be able to just one-handed mix up the bag of tokens without it needing to be much larger. Trade-offs.
- The game can feel a bit random, at times, just because there’s so little control over what comes out of the bag. Sometimes you just get a bad draw and there’s not much you can do on your turn, and that’s a bummer. Or, at least, you get a draw that might not be the colors you want. It’s rarer for you to have actually no moves.
Cons
- I kind of wish they had the intention or direction on the tokens; it can be very hard to remember which goes where, even though it’s on the center of the board. You can see it from the photos that the rock is kind of faint and the instructions aren’t necessarily super clear, so having a small icon on the tokens would go a long way to making it much simpler to know what you’re grabbing and where it’s going.
Overall: 8 / 10
Overall, Loco Momo is a lot of fun! I think it’s grown on me since my first play, probably because I didn’t know the rules when I first played and I just kind of winged it on BGA. Recommendation: don’t do that. But, once you learn the rules (which, embarrassingly for me, are extremely simple), it’s pretty easy for this to be a game you play to pass the time a bit or between other games. It’s quick and punchy, and the drafting elements call to mind some of the same strategies as River Valley Glassworks (which I reviewed this week), but in their own interesting way. Thinking about managing color and animal for how you want to place them for scoring isn’t necessarily going to tax your strategic centers, but it’s quick and fun and cute. I’d play it again and it’s rapidly becoming a “might as well keep playing” on BGA. I like quick and strategic games, and Loco Momo is pleasant and unassuming, even if I wish they had put clearer directions for each tile (even though that feels a bit wasteful). Having them on the board is nice, but they’re artistic so it’s not necessarily clear what does what. Either way, if you’re a fan of light strategy or you like cute animal games, you’ll probably enjoy Loco Momo! I have.
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