Kill The Unicorns: A Preview

Have you ever wondered why you have never seen a unicorn? Clearly, it isn’t for some mundane reason such as unicorns never existing. Instead, the answer could only be, because they’ve been hunted to extinction! Fear not though! You too can experience a tiny slice of that time when unicorns were a protected species and you could only hunt them four days a year with Kill The Unicorns by publisher Morning.

A warning before proceeding further, the copy reviewed here was a prototype Print’n’Play version. Major changes to the art or game mechanics are completely possible.

The Game

Each player is given a character at the start of the game. Each character has a set of hunt cards, which form the player’s hand during the round, a deck of trap cards, which we’ll get to in a moment, and a special ability. The game is played over a series of four rounds, with each round consisting of four ‘hunts’ or hands or tricks. Basically, four chances for each player to play cards. Every unicorn must be hunted, but the players do not need to participate in every hunt.

During the start of each round, before any of the hunts begin, each player draws two traps and discards one of them. Then each player puts their chosen trap face down under a unicorn that doesn’t already have a trap.  Then the hunts begin!

Starting with the first player, each player has the opportunity to participate in the hunt. Whoever is the first to participate declares how many cards they are playing, between one and three, and plays the cards face down in front of them. After that point, any other players joining the hunt must play that many cards. After every player has gotten the chance to play or to pass, the trap card and hunt cards are flipped face up with the trap card takes immediate effect. Unless otherwise stated, the player with the highest combined value of hunt cards wins the unicorn along with whatever bonus or malus it had on it. The player who won puts the unicorn into a collection and then becomes the starting player for the next hunt. This repeats for each of the four unicorns revealed.

Once all of the hunts have been completed, the players each get a chance to buy one item from the black market using any of their remaining hunt cards. There is a limited amount of each item, so something you want now may not be there later. After the four rounds are complete, players add up their points and whoever has the most is the winner.

“Points?” you cry, “You never mentioned points!”  And you would be right! There are four ways to get points:

• The unicorns themselves are worth 0-4 points
• Certain trap cards add bonus points to the unicorns
• There are black market items which add points or turn unicorns into points
• Set bonuses

The set bonuses are where you will need to plan out which unicorns you hunt. A set of the same colored unicorns is worth 2 points for 2 unicorns, 5 for 3, 8 for 4, and 12 for 5. Or if you build a collection of one unicorn from each color, it’s worth 8 points. If you build a collection with two of each color, you automatically win!

The Good

Kill The Unicorns has fairly simple mechanics and once everyone has a grasp of them, the game will move along at a fairly rapid pace. The artwork is streamlined and clean, keeping to a distinct style. The game is solidly a light, filler game and doesn’t really try to be anything more. It uses the two mechanics it’s built around to focus the gameplay and keep it moving. The first mechanic, set collection, is used to help shape each player’s decision regarding which unicorns to hunt for. The second, hidden information, ratchets up the tension between players and forces them to decide when the best time to use their power or where to place their trap card.

The Bad

The biggest problem that the game has is the wording. In the summary, I mentioned that each round lasts four ‘hunts’ but the actual rules uses the word hunt to refer to the game as well as each hand. Another big issue in the rules was that collections are so ill defined. There are essentially three mentions of collections. First, when you win a unicorn it can go into a collection; second, you get bonus points for each collection based on how many unicorns of the same color are in it; and third, if there are more than five unicorns of the same color in a collection, the player must start a new collection. Does this mean that the player can have more than one color in a collection? If so, would they score all sets of colors for points? Can unicorns be moved around freely from collection to collection? If a card doubles the amount that unicorn counts for, does that mean there can only be four unicorns of that color in that collection? These are two of the bigger examples from the rules, but it captures my experience with them quite well.

My next problem with the game is how shallow it is: it lacks much if any depth.  This shows up in two ways. First, it hardly feels any different to be playing The Knight as it does The Wizard. Sure, they have different powers, but those feel more like “Here’s this extra thing I can do once each round. It may help me win one unicorn.” There’s nothing that helps dictate how that character could be played best! And there’s a real easy solution: change the traps up! Currently, each player has eight traps. Five are common traps for every player, one is a unique trap to that character, and another character also has the last two traps. If the traps were adjusted to be more thematic for each character type, it would increase the amount of depth the game had!

The second way the shows its lack of depth is through its connection to the title. There is the barest connection to killing the unicorns within the game. Certainly, you are hunting the unicorns but, aside from turning a unicorn into a pâté, there is no connection to the title of the game! And with how simple the artwork is and how it focuses on using pastel colors, the juxtaposition would have been amazing! The theme really should have been one of the game’s biggest strengths. As it is, you are only informed that you are killing the unicorns, which means you might as well be bidding on power crystals that will eventually be used to mine asteroids.

The last big problem I have with the game is the balance between the different characters. In case you couldn’t see in the picture earlier, here is a summary of their powers:

The Knight – Switch hunt cards with another player once everyone has placed.

The Wizard – Before playing hunt cards, look at all the hunt cards on the table.

The Shaman – Before entering the hunt, look at the unicorn’s trap card. You must participate.

The Queen – Before a hunt takes place, switch two trap cards around without looking at them.

The first thing to note here, is that only two of the character’s abilities require that player to be in the hunt (Knight and Shaman), but this could just be another wording issue on the part of the Wizard. Which brings me to the actual problem: the Queen is by far the weakest of the characters. In a game of hidden information, she gains no advantage, no extra information, from using her special ability. All the other characters either learn something or have a chance at gaining advantage when they activate their abilities. The Queen just gets to be a chaos monkey, making it even harder for that player to win.

Final Thoughts

I would not recommend this game at the moment. The rules are sprawling and obtuse, there isn’t any clear breakdown on what things or what things do (I had to look through the cards and rules about five times before I figured out what the starting unicorns were), and the game barely works the theme it proposes into the actual gameplay. It does have a strong core gameplay to build around, so it might be worth backing at the one dollar level to see what they do and if they improve on the game before the Kickstarter campaign ends. The seed for a good game is there. Whether it will blossom into a rainbow, is really the question.

If you would like to find out more, check out their Kickstarter at this link.