In Eclipse Publishing's Ratland, players control competing colonies of rats. If that doesn't sound immediately appealing, the cartoon artwork from Ramses Bosque and Matias Cazorla help set the tongue-in-cheek theme; tho' the artists go for funny rather than cute. And that's fitting because Eduardo Garciá Martin's design for Ratland has given us an amusing, sometimes frustrating, push-your-luck game with a high 'take that' factor.
Players each start off with seven rats and at the end of the game (which is randomised in the range 7-12 turns) the victory goes to the player who has the most rats. Players have their own individual boards and screens and so, simultaneously and hidden behind your screen, you allocate your rats worker-placement-style to various locations on your board. Any rats allocated to the nursery will breed and so increase the number of rats available to you on the next turn. Of course your rats need to be fed, so the game requires players to collect cheese. Each round there's an event card with a specific effect for the round, plus a card that shows the mix of plastic cheese pieces to go into a bag for each of three locations. Choose a location and you draw cheese from the bag, but that could include cheese pieces of various colours, some of which have particular effects: orange cheeses are worth two ordinary (yellow) cheeses but white cheeses have no value at all. You might also draw poison cheese. Your board shows pipes leading to the left and right, and so another option is to allocate rats to raid the pantries of neighbouring players. To protect your cheese stocks from being raided, you'll need to allocate rats as pantry guards. As you might guess, the simultaneous secret allocation of rats to positions on your board involves a healthy mix of bravado, bluffing and push-your-luck gambles. You need to end a turn with sufficient food to feed your rat population or one or more will be sent to the graveyard where they'll be worth negative points in end-game scoring.
All-in-all Ratland is a simple easy-to-play game where the fun is in second-guessing neighbours' allocations and trying to take advantage of them. It's unashamedly 'take that': you'll almost certainly be raiding and be raided by neighbours, especially when the locations offer comparatively thin pickings, but the light-hearted theme makes it all seem that much less personal than other games. You can even step up the 'take that' element by playing with the more aggressive side of the player board where raids can kill opponents' rats rather than just steal from them.
Tho' the rats are just represented by cardboard tokens, you're sure to be impressed by the great-looking plastic wedges of cheese. These are anything but cheesy, and they certainly add to the game's appeal. Ratland takes 2-6 players but we enjoyed it most at 4 or 5; just enough for bluff, banter and misdirection without overly extending the game, especially if the randomising game ending card doesn't come up until the 12th round. Most of our plays at Board's Eye View ran to a comfortable 30 minutes.