Tabletop
The Joy of Tiny Wooden Critters
From standard wooden pigs in Carcassonne to screen-printed herds in Zoo Tycoon, the simple joy of collecting, arranging, and breeding animeeples is often reason enough to bring a game home.
We’ve come a long way from the pawn-derived player movers from old roll-and-move games. I feel like one of the best representatives of the rise in popularity of modern board games is the meeple - that little humanesque wooden piece with unusual layers of trademark protections. But naturally the industry didn’t stop with wooden people, and many board games have these abstract representations of everything from lumber to vegetables.
But animal tokens - or animeeples, if you prefer - are often quite adorable in their own special way. I think my very first encounter with a wooden animal token in a board game had to be the pig in Carcassonne: Traders & Builders. Sure, those pigs were restricted to player colors and didn’t feel as realistic (and they’re terribly hard to play effectively), but you can’t deny a little pig alongside your stand meeples makes for a very interesting sight.
Our very first big Uwe Rosenberg game was Caverna, and this also introduced us to Rosenberg’s significant interest in animal husbandry and the need to have different animal tokens to illustrate that process. Yes, we didn’t go through Agricola first and enjoyed the motherlode of animals that Caverna has instead, with its dogs, sheep, donkeys, boars, and cows. I have a special affinity for those donkeys (especially in mines), and the little dogs that look a little too much like the wood resources in the game. We could just never get over how you’d only get one new animal whenever breeding happened. It’s like the whole herd would gather and watch the one couple of animals ensuring the future of their species.
The other notable animal game in the Rosenberg part of our collection is obviously New York Zoo. Sure, it’s really a tricky spatial reasoning game and not quite like his usually more agrarian titles. But it also features a very generous range of animals (that still breed), including meerkats, flamingos, tree kangaroos, penguins, arctic foxes, and a giant elephant token that acts as the first player marker. I derive so much satisfaction from filling up those tiles with the very colorful animals. It makes for a lovely shifting tableau.
Some special mentions for another Rosenberg game, Atiwa, which mainly has little bat tokens that hold a special place in my heart. Having sufficient spaces to host your bat population is a whole other matter entirely, but such are the joys of this hobby. Another single-animal gem that comes to mind is Lowlands. While it’s not a Rosenberg game, it uses pretty much the same sheep mold, but really leans into just managing those sheep and sparing them from the flood. Our copy of the game has an odd skinny sheep that is half the thickness of the standard one. My partner likes to keep that particular sheep on his board, even if it has no impact on the game.
And a special mention to Dinosaur Island, which includes a crazy number of dinosaur tokens to populate your amusement parks. They don’t get a more prominent feature in this post primarily because they’re made of plastic instead of wood. But those are too many dinosaurs for me to ignore entirely, so I thought I’d give them a quick shoutout.
Some of my more recent board game acquisitions have been almost primarily based on the wide range of animals included. A great example of this is Zoo Tycoon: The Board Game (because we totally needed another zoo board game), as the game comes with over 200 animeeples covering 23 unique species with distinct male and female tokens. It’s a pretty heavy game that put a lot of effort into trying to recapture the magic of the original computer game, but all of that is more than worth having all these animals on your zoo board - even better when you have the Kickstarter/Deluxe screen-printed ones. I do love a classic abstract wooden animal token, but the screen printing does add a unique flair to things. We’ve yet to play our copy of the New Shores expansion, which adds another 34 animal species with another 300+ animeeples. That’s a LOT of wood.
The other game that felt particularly indulgent is Rewild: South America. The main animal joy in this game is derived from its beautiful cards with very Studio Ghibli-style art. But the game still comes with over 30 animal tokens with some special branch ones that…can sit on the cardboard trees that come with the game. The first time I demonstrated this aspect of the game to our friends, they immediately quipped that they now understood why I gambled on this game from a lesser-known publisher.
While I don’t think that screen-printed tokens are automatically better than the classic monochrome ones, the value of an animeeple as a whole comes from how these tokens integrate into the game experience as a whole. Being absolutely cute to hold in your hands is a bonus, for sure. But on the whole, it really makes a difference to have the animals populate your board instead of just moving a slider or using even more abstract cubes to represent your critters.
There’s no getting away from the visual aspect of the board game hobby. It’s why we often talk about the table presence of a game and not just the strength of its mechanics. The best games are able to balance both aspects of the experience and make sure all design elements come together. And this is why we’ll continue to consider what new wooden pieces a board game may add to our collection - especially if they bring to life more obscure animals.
