The Fox Experiment Review – Breeding the Perfect “Rascal”

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

Despite The Fox Experiment being a light and fluffy game of matchmaking mummy and daddy foxes, it challenged me. Sending me on a journey of self-reflection about the ethics of animal experimentation.

Based on a 1958 experiment that continues today, scientists attempted to recreate the domestication of wolves into dogs by breeding foxes for their friendliness. The results of this experimentation are beyond fascinating. They found that both psychological traits, such as tail wagging and barking, and physical traits, like spots and floppy ears, emerged within only a few generations of foxes.

It’s so easy to get caught up in these exciting results, that you miss thinking about the suffering the foxes endured. Not to scare you off though as The Fox Experiment focuses heavily on the success of the science, however, it doesn’t dispense completely with this darker undertone. Making it one of the more interesting board games I’ve played.

Putting aside the theme, The Fox Experiment is a wonderful mid-weight board game, that’s beautifully presented. The art is gorgeous to look at and evocative of the science taking place. While the pastel colour scheme and fox meeples work overtime to remind you to have fun while playing.

As for gameplay, The Fox Experiment feels like you’re on a train moving from station to station with each station being a new phase filled with opportunities for thought. The first of which is an intense drafting phase, before moving on to rolling dice to breed foxes and gain trait tokens. Finally, you’ll spend earnt trait tokens to purchase upgrades for the next round.

Throughout this train ride, one big point-scoring opportunity is completing your study card. Given to you at the start of the game, it requires you to birth a fox with specific traits. With each card having three levels, you’ll need to keep putting together the perfect pair of foxes to complete the card.

Otherwise, you also gain points from upgrades purchased, patrons, and friendliness awards. Add all these sources up after five rounds to find out who wins the game.

Anatomy of a turn

The best way to do a deep examination of The Fox Experiment is to do a walkthrough of a round. Starting with the three turns of drafting. During this, you select a male and female fox, and a resource token (that also determines player order for the next turn).

Given you’re only selecting three objects and each of those objects has multiple options, you have a lot to mull over. Is it more important to select the strongest female fox now? Or get a good position on the player track for the next turn? Knowing whatever you don’t pick will probably disappear before your next turn. This adds emphasis to your choice and creates a lot of fun reevaluation as things start disappearing.

Specifically at the 3-4 player count. At 2-players you add in a dummy player that takes away some options but is missing the same cutthroated-ness you get from other human beings.

Next, you put on some Marvin Gaye and breed your foxes by grabbing the number of coloured dice shown on both of your fox cards plus any wild dice you have lying around. Then comes some of the most satisfying dice rolling I’ve experienced outside of a dungeon crawler. As by round 5 you’re rolling upwards of 10+ dice for each new kit in your litter.

From the joy of holding so many dice to hearing them scatter across the tabletop, there’s a satisfying tactility to this phase of the game. That doesn’t stop until you piece together all the resulting die faces like a puzzle. Creating symbols of each of the four traits: curly tails, rounded ears, friendly barking, and spots.

This is when you decide whether or not to use your science cards (which give you one-off abilities) or friendliness tokens to maximise the number of traits your new fox has. As more traits might mean more points, or maybe there’s a specific trait you need – but didn’t get.

Once you’re happy, you start filling in a fox card drawn from your deck, these cards have spaces to capture all of the symbols rolled, which you fill in with a dry-erase marker. The owner of the fox with the most filled-in spaces wins the friendliness award for the round. While everyone else receives a consolation prize of a wild token or two that they can use later.

These fresh-faced foxes will be added to the draft phase next round. But before then, you’ll use the research tokens gained to pay for upgrades. Such as more kits in each of your litters, additional study cards, and scientific patrons who provide end-game scoring opportunities.

As an aside, things get a little complicated when you unlock the ability to have multiple foxes per litter. It’s nothing you won’t be able to handle. But because everything else in The Fox Experiment is so seamless, you’ll notice it getting a bit weird.

Anyway, spending trait tokens for upgrades is how you plot your course through future rounds and put your strategic mind to work. As there are more options here than what you can ever afford. You need to be careful about deciding what you need, and what you can let go of.

A mid-weight marvel

The unfortunate reality of this type of breeding is that the goal is never to provide luxury for the foxes. This is where feelings get conflicted, and deep questions about morality are asked.

Now, The Fox Experiment is a fun and lighthearted board game. But there’s this moment where it all becomes a bit real, and it happens so quickly that if you blink you’ll miss it.

You spend time puzzling out the best way to build a fox, getting them as many traits as possible. Name it something quirky like Rascal, or Rusty, and put it up for draft. Then in the next draft round, you bring Rascal home to produce an heir.

It’s this moment. The second after Rascal has sired an offspring, he’s no longer of any use to you. Rascal won’t score you any more points, or provide any other benefits. So, despite spending a couple of turns on making Rascal perfect, you end up discarding Rascal and forgetting about him for the rest of the game.

The first time this happened, I felt a pang of emotion. Because it was sad and brought home the reality of the experiment.

Soon after we stopped spending so much time coming up with creative names for these foxes, because what was the point?

For this reason, beyond the fun I had, I enjoyed The Fox Experiment because it taught me so much. About the science of domestication, this experiment, and myself. Even though it can be challenging, using board games to explore new and uncomfortable situations safely is something I want to see more of. It elevates the hobby to something more meaningful than just sitting around and throwing dice.

However, in saying that, you don’t need to engage with The Fox Experiment on that level. It’s still a mid-weight marvel, and if you liked Wingspan you’re most likely going to like this one as well.

Oh, and did I mention how satisfying the dice rolling is?