The games are about to begin! So choose your animal, plan your strategy, and get ready to go head to head as animals compete in the 100 meter sprint, the synchronized swimming, or the ever elegant Royal Rumble competitions!

What is The Champion of the Wild?

The Champion of the Wild is a social card game where players become professional animal coaches who must help their animal compete in events. 

There are a few different game modes provided I’m the rule book. I will give a brief overview of the Triathlon.

First players choose events from 5 different event categories. Each player who chose an event will state the rules for that event, providing any parameters that coaches must follow with their animals.

Players then choose their creature. A hand of animal cards are dealt to each player who must then look through and decide which one animal they want to coach through all three events against the other animals.

Once animals are chosen, the games begin. Events are played out by open discussion with each coach presenting the strategy that they will use for their animal and challenging the likely performance of their rivals’ animals. During this time player can ask each other questions or defend their strategies. There are no rules here just as long as players follow the guidelines of the event as determined during the event selection phase. Players should use this time to show why their animal would perform the best in the current event so as to earn the highest rank.

After the open discussion, all players will then use their voting chips to rank each other player (not including themselves) for how they expect the event to have played out based on the discussion. Secretly giving first, second, third, etc tokens so no player can see where they placed.

Players then continue on to the next event and repeat the discussion and voting steps. 

Once all events have been played through, all players count up their voting tokens to see who has the most points and becomes the Champion of the Wild.

Our Thoughts

We were really interested in the concept of this game prior to playing it. We are often fans of games where outside-of-the-box thinking is involved and those that involve a bit of improvisational skills. 

However, on a game level, The Champion of the Wild fell flat for us and our kids. There isn’t too much of a game here, it’s very casual and requires almost no strategy as it’s purely discussion driven and players are at the mercy of how well they can entertain their audience. 

Inside the rules booklet are a bunch of different “game modes” for players to alter the play experience to suit their needs. For example: You can choose to not play the main 3 event game and choose for a longer game with 5 or even 10 events. Or you can choose to not pick one animal but opt to choose a unique animal for each competition. There’s an attempt to add an educational element into the mix by allowing players to use the internet to look up facts about the animals that might help them in the discussion phase. There’s still another where animals are drafted, another where events are entirely random, a tag-team pentathlon etc. etc. None really improved the game itself and many often made it more drawn out which is the opposite of what everyone wanted. 

Our kids are constantly playing the “Who would win” games, which is exactly what Champion of the Wild boils down to being. In the car while traveling, they’ll make us choose which animal we think would win in a fight. (T-Rex always beats everything, no matter how clever you are with its challenger.) 

This activity is fun for a few minutes, but struggles for the length of a 20+ minute game where often even the cleverest of players can’t come up for how Hummingbirds would best river otters in a synchronized swimming competition. 

We all enjoyed the amount of animals included and the many many unique challenges are fun. The art is really nice and our kids will look through all the cards for ages. They love to pick out their favorite animals and enjoy finding the silliest competitions. All the standard olympic trials are included, but then they really went for it with competitions like Sumo Wrestling or the Animal Car Crush (my son’s favorite) which are quite silly to imagine animals competing in. 

Games that involve open discussion like this are always a “play at your own risk” for kids. They can often heat up quickly or cause kids to melt without much warning as feelings are hurt when their suggestion isn’t accepted while another’s is. This happened a couple of times while we played with our kids, so we eliminated any questioning or challenging of a player’s methods and just had everyone explain how they were going to coach their animal. 

While I don’t think this is the best fit for young kids, I do see it as a decent option for older children or as a silly exercise for Jr High and High School students who need to practice their public speaking skills in a fun and non threatening way. Champion of the Wild and other games in this genre provide a nice opportunity or players to think through quickly what they might want to say to persuade their audience and then they must present it confidently to the group. So even though this feel a bit short for us, I still see potential in it from this angle. And as always, the group you play this with will greatly impact the game’s success. If you have a group of friends who love to get together to laugh and play lighter party games during social gatherings, I can definitely see The Champion of the Wild being a hit.

Game Info:
Title: The Champion of the Wild
3-8 Players Ages 8+
Designer: Tom Clare
Artist: Kevin Chapman, Dave Heaton, Dan Mission 
Publisher: Big Imagination Games

The Tabletop Family received a free copy The Champion of the Wild in exchange for an honest review. As always our thoughts and opinions are our own. 

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