Take the Perfect Shot, Avoid Snakes in St Patrick, and Collect Spirits in Tatsu

by W. Eric Martin

For the most part at Gen Con 2022, I focused on previewing upcoming game releases so that I could write about titles due out at SPIEL ’22 in October. Arnaud Charpentier at French publisher Matagot previewed four upcoming games, the largest of them being Peter Pan from designer Marc Paquien, who previously worked with Matagot on 2018’s Treasure Island.

As in that earlier game, in Peter Pan you and your fellow players draw on the game board, so the surface is incredibly glossy and will resist your efforts to take photographs:

Shiny!

Unlike that earlier game, Peter Pan is co-operative, with everyone trying to rescue the Lost Children before pirates capture you too many times. Each player starts somewhere on the board, and they know the location of one Lost Child — but they cannot rescue that child. No, for some reason they can only give clues to that child’s location to a neighboring player.

On a turn, you choose two cards from your hand, one showing a distance and another a feature on the game board, then you place them next to your opponent’s player board on a sliding scale from “go this way” or “run from this”. You can also indicate the level of pirate activity in the area where you are sending them. The player interprets this info how they will, then draws a path on the game board. If they think circumstances are right, they can then “search” for the Lost Child by drawing a circle around their new location. If you find them, great! Find a pirate? Not so good. Find nothing? Well, you’ll get another clue next time.

Arnaud and Nikki Pontius at Gen Con 2022

Thus, you need to figure out how to turn garbage clues into something useful, with you drawing new clue cards — either distance, location, or both — at the end of your turn. The game board has multiple locations with mountains, forest, teepees, and other matching items, so you need to take chances and just wing it sometimes: “Last time they told me forest-2, but now they’re telling me mountain-1, yet mountains aren’t nearby, so I probably went to the wrong forest, so they probably want me over here.” You can’t take too long as threats escalate over time. Those Lost Children aren’t going to survive without food and water, you know…

• We played only a few rounds of Peter Pan, but we completed a full game of Romain Caterdjian‘s Perfect Shot, which took about 20 minutes.

You’re trying to take pictures of various animals, and to do that, you choose a “camera” card in your hand and place it in the card holder on top of all previously played cards. Your camera card has one or two lens holes in it, and you take a matching animal tile for any animal partially or fully seen in your lens. Before laying down your card, you can call “Perfect shot”, and if the entirety of an animal appears within your lens, you receive bonus points along with the tile.

When you spot a yeti in your lens, you draw a yeti tile that shows only the left or right side of the elusive yeti. Ideally you can get both tiles to score more points.

Instead of playing a camera card, you can take an album card from the open display or the deck. Albums give you a place to mount your animal tiles, and if you follow the guidelines on the album — different landscapes, all animals the same, etc. — you receive bonus points. Only mounted tiles score points, so mount up before time runs out.

• Tatsu is an updated version of Wolfgang Werner‘s trick-taking card game Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, first published in 1997 by Bambus Spieleverlag. Whereas that earlier game was for 3-4 players, Tatsu is for 2-4 players and can be played individually or in teams. Here’s a quick overview:

Carefully choose when to play your strongest cards and when to press your luck with fusion cards to collect even more cards from your opponent. You and your opponent have the same decks, though, and they can fight back just as hard as you, so always think two steps ahead in order to claim the most cards and (most importantly) your opponent’s multiplier spirits, which are divided into two distinct clans: red/black and yellow/white.

Mock-up cards at Gen Con 2022

The game ends when a player reaches 500 points, at which time the player/team with the most points wins.

• The final Matagot title is another trick-taking card game: St Patrick from designers Haig Tahta and Sacha Tahta Alexander.

Given the title character, this description of gameplay might not be a surprise:

St Patrick is a trick-taking game played over several rounds in which you compete to retain the most life points by using relics to avoid snake bites.

Each round has three phases: deal cards, recover relics, and hunt snakes. Watch out, though, because if players are greedy and all the relics are recovered prior to the snake hunt, the relics turn to curses and each player loses as many life points as the number of relics they’ve collected. Keep playing rounds until after a snake hunt one of the players has lost all 20 of their starting life points. At the end of that round, whoever has the most life points wins.

Cards to interpret

Okay, more info is needed to know exactly what’s going on here, but that’s what I know right now.