Emerge Review – Crabs and Gulls and Turtles Oh My!

Disclaimer: Emerge was provided for free by Pandasaurus Games, although the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

Somethings in the water over at Pandasaurus Games, and apparently, it’s you. Emerge is the second of their 2023 releases that take you boating and exploring the local archipelagos (the other being the wonderful Beacon Patrol). This time, however, you’re on an expedition of discovery. Observing and researching the local fauna and flora all in the name of science… and victory points.

In each round of Emerge, you’ll be rolling dice and placing them on your player board. Attempting to discover animals and plants, as well as compete for several public objectives.

The numbers rolled on your dice dictate which section of your board they go. For instance, all your ones move into your plants’ section, your twos go into your crabs’ section and so forth. Other sections include turtles, seals, islands, and birds.

But before your dice roll, you first decide if you’re going to add or remove any modifier sections to your player board. These modifiers let you duplicate sections of your player board. So that both ones and fives will let you discover plants for example. They also give you handy dice manipulation abilities.

After all dice are placed, you take turns spending them to discover. Now there are restrictions around discovering, such as all islands only accept one animal of each type and up to four plants. Additionally, you can’t discover crabs until you’ve discovered plants, turtles until you’ve discovered crabs, and seals until you discover turtles.

Discovering birds causes them to migrate from island to island, letting you steal them from other players. Meanwhile, the first time you discover an island it’s the size of a sand bar.

But as you spend more dice to discover the same island you increase its size from small to medium to large. How you confuse a small island with a large one is a worry, and maybe a sign your research grant should be revoked. Anyway, with each new size, you slide a new tile under the current island creating a neat visual of just how big the island is.

Discovering new islands also gives you research tokens. One-time effects that provide bonus abilities like free island upgrades or dice discounts on animals. You can also acquire these tokens through a marketplace by spending any two dice at the end of the round.

At the end of eight rounds, players count their victory points by multiplying the size of their islands by the amount of stuff on them. Adding three points for each island with a complete ecosystem, and any points from public objectives.

Re-learning how to play

Emerge is a beautiful-looking dice puzzle that offers you plenty of control over your dice. But a big draw to the game is its presentation. The soft colour palette and the mixture of warm and cool colours give Emerge a unique look that feels like you’re on a cruise watching the setting sun. Add in the animal tokens and the stacking land tiles and you’ve got a board game that stands out when it’s on the table.

Yet Emerge is more than just a pretty face. A lot of the fun comes from the extremely low probability of rolling six dice and them landing the way you want. So you need to puzzle out how to make the best use of what’s in front of you. Which often feels like shoving a square dice into a round hole.

To its credit, Emerge gives you a whole toolkit to manipulate these dice through its modifier sections. For instance, if you want crabs, you can add an extra crab section to your board. Stacking the odds that you’ll roll crabs this coming turn.

If that doesn’t work, then you can use the modifier ability from the tile. These abilities are different for each section. So often you’re grabbing a modifier section for its ability, even when it clogs up your player board.

However, there’s a third option with Emerge’s modifier sections. In that, if you don’t spend all of your dice in one round you can save them for the next. By placing a modifier section on top of these saved dice, you guarantee what they’re going to be in the coming round.

It took me several games before I felt comfortable doing this though. As with almost any other board game, giving up so many resources is a recipe for last place. Yet when I finally committed to this strategy it worked wonders. I managed to snag almost all of the public objectives before anyone even got close. At that point, it felt great, and I felt rewarded for my play.

Yet despite my skilful and strategic use of the dice, by the end of the game, it didn’t matter.

All is one, one is all

The theme of discovering unexplored islands fills you with ideas of finding unique islands full of interesting ecosystems. In Emerge you find anything but. Due to strict restrictions on the number and timing of placing tokens on an island, everything becomes incredibly homogenous.

So instead of finding weird and wonderful islands, like one filled with crabs, or another that is just turtles, you find islands that are no different than the islands you’ve discovered before. As though these islands just fell off a production line somewhere and straight into the ocean.

This monotony applies to scoring as well. Each meeple, whether it’s a crab that costs two dice or a seal that costs four, is worth one point. So when you’re progressing your ecosystems, you’re spending more resources per point than someone just getting started. Resulting in close-scoring games regardless of how well you play.

Then, if like me, you focus on the objectives, the reward for doing so doesn’t outweigh the points you could gain if you focused on building animals, plants or islands. Many of the games I played came down to the last round, where someone stole a bird from a large island for a 6-point swing, or I ended up with four dice in positions I couldn’t use.

Meaning even though the gameplay is enjoyable and fun, the result isn’t.

Finally, there aren’t any interesting stories or strategies from the many games of Emerge I played, because everyone did the same things, in the same order every time. It’s this on-rails experience holding the rest of Emerge back from being one heck of a fantastic board game.