The Rats of Wistar: What a fun experience?

The Rats of Wistar: Play as rats that have escaped from a lab. A beautiful game with impeccable mechanics but which leaves a taste of unfinished business.

The Rats of Wistar: Game Theme

Warning : In the interest of transparency towards our community, we would like to point out that this article reflects our personal opinion on the game. We have not received any compensation from the game publisher. We have independently acquired and tested the game, without commercial link with its publisher. The reviews presented here represent our honest and unbiased analysis of the game, based on our own experience.

The Wistar Rat is a strain of laboratory rats that comes from a famous biomedical research institute in Philadelphia: the Wistar Institute. In the board game “The Rats of Wistar”, we will play as one of these rats, escaped from the institute (probably in the style of Prison Break) and endowed with extraordinary abilities acquired from professors specializing in biomedical technologies.

The escapees quickly created a colony in a peaceful place. This colony is growing at high speed thanks to the skills and inventions of our learned rats. The harmony of the young community must face the challenges generated by the constant expansion of the number of members. In order to effectively organize this expanding colony, it will be necessary to appoint a leader. For this, a 5-day competition is organized. The candidates will have to complete objectives in order to prove their skills and access the supreme power of this new rat-public…

The gaming zone: 2 rooms – 2 atmospheres

The central plateau is divided into two distinct parts. The left part is devoted to exploring the farm. Here, your explorer rat will have to sneak from the steps of the house in order to collect resources, discover new missions or even recruit new mice in the different rooms of the farm.

The content of the rooms is more or less abundant depending on the number of players. The rooms in the basement of the house offer content different from the living area and in the cellar, the most daring four-legged adventurers will be able to enjoy a premium AOP cheese. You’ll have to be quick, there won’t be something for everyone!

The right side of the board is dedicated to the wheel, the heart of the game mechanics. The wheel contains 6 sectors, divided into 3 areas: the farm, the forest and the burrow. Each sector of the wheel is linked to a different main action:

1. Explore the farm
2. Collecting wood
3. Recover metal
4. Digging rooms
5. Building Beds
6. Develop projects

In addition to the main action, bonus action slots are available. Their number varies from 1 to 3 depending on the sectors, which is a rather clever element of the gameplay (or giant rat for the last player, but we’ll talk about that below).

A little technical point: the wheel is fixed to the main board with a screw. For the most refined among us, this may seem like a terrible improvised DIY ordeal, but your longest fingernail or the smallest screwdriver in your toolbox will quickly overcome this unusual technical difficulty on a board game.

Each player also has an individual board, on which we find our 3 leaders, our workers, rooms that will accommodate new mice and a list of abilities to unlock as we complete missions. Each player will have next to their board their resources, their inventions and a game aid card for quick actions.

The setup takes about 20 minutes and is not difficult, the rulebook guides you perfectly and the material is not only aesthetically pleasing but also quite easy to use.

Rat-ply, now it’s time to play

The game takes place in 5 rounds (which represent the 5 days of competition) each containing 3 rounds, represented by your number of leader tokens. Which will take you 15 turns to get the maximum points and beat your opponents.

The mechanics are based on the installation of workers and this famous wheel. Each player will take turns placing one of their Chef tokens on the wheel in order to perform a main action and its bonus action. The player will perform the main action a number of times equal to the number of workers he has placed in this area of ​​the board.

The quarters of the wheel will be placed differently at the start of each game. They will also be different depending on the number of players and the wheel will turn one sector between each turn. So it’s impossible to get tired of it. Some sectors of the wheel only offer one location. And this is where all the spice of the game lies. The number of actions available is therefore limited and a real strategy must be put in place to access the desired actions. Being the first player is therefore a real advantage, but this advantage can be contested in each round of the game, from the alchemist’s hut.

Interaction is quite limited in the game, but this pressure around the actions still available on the wheel will sometimes create real tension around the board. This is much less present at 2 (too bad). The last player in the round will quickly find himself growling at the rat-pacer who has swooped down on the last location in the sector of the wheel he coveted.

Exploration of the farm – Visit here

The exploration part of the farm is much more zen. We open doors, we collect some resources and we unlock missions for all players. Exploration allows us to gradually develop our game. The temptation to race to be the first in the cellar and savor a good cheese platter with relish is very present. Here, there are resources for all adventurers so the competition is less fierce and we can take the time to enjoy the successful illustrations.

This part of the board is less central in the mechanics, it is quite possible to just enter the first room and be satisfied with the missions available in it during a game. The resource rewards are useful but limited, a little too limited perhaps.

Rat-chitic resources

The main difficulty of the game is resource management. Indeed, these are really limited. During the game, our brain is constantly looking for how to optimize the meager resources we have. This slows down the development, our thoughts and therefore the pace of the game.

This seems to be a desire of the game, to constantly place us in front of difficult choices. The players face the game much more than their opponents. An excellent point to guarantee intense concentration on the game and its mechanics. The difficulty of optimization often causes people to breathe around the table. The game is therefore exciting for sudoku fans but frustrating for amateurs.

During the game, each player tries to set up a small combination by unlocking abilities related to their inventions in order to find a major advantage towards a defined strategy. In vain, in none of my games have I been able to reach round 5 with a combo that frees me from my difficulties. Nor have my opponents. In the Rats of Wistar, we develop, we progress, we succeed in missions but we do not free ourselves from our cage. A final liberating round where you can fully enjoy all your efforts, where you validate/regret your strategic choices during the game is sorely lacking.

No victory: Rat-té again

At the end of the 5th round (we could have had a sixth), each player counts their points and the highest total will designate our big winner. The points are counted quite quickly and without difficulty. A small difference in icon between the immediate victory points, won during the game, and those to be counted at the end of the game would have been appreciated.

The designation of the winner is quite anecdotal. At the end of the game, the players exchange their satisfactions and regrets of the recently finished game. We quickly feel the desire to try our luck again with a few strategic changes. The game offers a good margin of progression and the replayability is great. The variety of the games is without doubt with a substantial content, like the 180 beautifully illustrated invention cards.

Solo mode: I face Roborat

The Rats of Wistar also offers a single player mode. And I have to say that this one is particularly relevant. Since many of us face the game more than our opponents, there is no reason why just facing the game should not be a sufficient challenge. The content and mechanics of the single player mode are perfectly successful. It’s a real challenge to beat the game and best of all, the difficulty level is adjustable.

In mechanics, it is very close to a 2-player game. The rulebook dedicated to Solo mode is very clear and guides us serenely in this adventure of more than an hour. I must say that this solo mode is an excellent surprise for me, who is not usually a fan of this mode.

The Rats of Wistar, verdict

The Rats of Wistar offers you an original and elegantly illustrated theme that is quickly forgotten in favor of a judicious and enjoyable game mechanic. This mechanic works very well regardless of the number of players, with in particular a very good solo mode that will offer you challenges with a modular difficulty level. The resources being very limited, the gameplay is demanding and sometimes even frustrating. There is always a little taste of unfinished business at the end of the game. The game is rather ungrateful in the face of our efforts and does not allow us to feel a resolution to the game, whether through regrets or satisfaction with the result of our strategic decisions. We were not far from an excellent game, but it is difficult to ignore this bitterness so rat-dically pronounced at the time of putting the rats back in the cage… the game in its box.

Not bad !

• Label The Green : No. To find out more about the Dé Vert label, click here.
• Creation : Danilo Sabia, Simone Luciani
• Illustrations : Candida Corsi, Sara Valentino
• Editing : Intrafin
• Numbers of players and players : 1 – 4
• Recommended age : From 13 years old (frustrating difficulty for young people…)
• Duration : 90 minutes (often more)
• Theme : Animals, nature
• Main mechanics : Placement of workers, management of resources. To find out more about the different game mechanics, click here.

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