It’s time to join the colonies on Planet Binxadinx and you have been selected! Forget about your inexperience, strap in to your Dogship and lets fly across the wilderness looking for all type of odd and unique creatures. But beware of the Space Cats, awoken from hibernation and in need of collection as well! It’s up to us to go and be the very best Rocket Ranchers in the galaxy!
Rocket Ranchers is a new game coming to Kickstarter from Binxadinx Games. It plays 2-6 players in approximately 40 mins.
Overview
In Rocket Ranchers players will fly around in their Dogship collecting animals from the 4×4 grid of cards that represents the wilderness at Planet Binxadinx. Collect them, corral them and see how many sets you can make, the more you have the more points they are worth but don’t diversify too much as corrals cost points. Space Cats are also in the mix, collect a bunch and they are worth points but don’t collect too little!
Gameplay
Players begin with their own deck representing their dogship. Wilderness animals are added based on player count and shuffled, creating a 4×4 grid in the center face-up to begin. Now you are ready to start collecting animals!
On your turn, players will do one of two actions. They can either Play a Card or Reboot. For play a card, choose a tractor beam from your hand or special program and collect the animals in that shape on the card. This card is discarded into your personal pile and any animals are placed into a corral. Either place them with animals of the same type or flip one face-down to create a new corral for a different collection of animals. Space cats are not in corrals and are set off to the side in your floof pile.
You can also reboot your dogship on a turn to return played cards to hand. Or if you have used all four of your tractor beam cards you auto-reboot at the end of your turn.
The game ends once the wilderness deck is empty from refilling the spots on the board. Players finish out to the start player and then score their cards. Each corral scores based on the number of animals of the same type in it, and the Space cats score as well based on number.
Thoughts
Overall this is game is a cute, fun game with the characters really popping of the cards in a wide variety of quirky styles. We have played this at all player counts and really enjoy the tension and cardplay, deciding where and when to grab the right creatures to make your sets pop. It’s all about quantity, as this will help set your corrals full of all the good animals!
I have played this with a variety of people of different ages as well and have found the game to be very easy and straightforward to play for gamers and non-gamers alike. We had some younger players at the table as well and they understood the basics and only needed a little help to guide through their moves. So for family game night this one is definitely going to be popular.
Make sure to check this one on Kickstarter HERE and get behind all the fun social media levels to unlock more fun for the game. Good luck Rancher-and watch out for those Space Cats on Planet Binxadinx!
Thanks for the kind words about our game!!