Publisher: Pandasaurus Games
Player Count: 2-5 Players
Dedicated Solo mode: No
Game Length: 40 Minutes
Complexity 2/5

As graffiti artists, it’s your job to earn street cred by bringing color and life to the city. Outperform your opponents by racing across town and becoming the first to spread your name to all the local districts. Time is limited and you’re only a couple steps ahead of the cops so bring your A-game in this unique, fast-paced, party-style game.

Wildstyle is a real-time, dexterity game of set collection, area control and pattern building. Players will be drawing cards, attempting to match sets and then beat their opponents to claim various tiles on the play area. Enter in pattern scorning end game bonus goals and you got a lot to think about in a short period of time. Wildstyle can be stressful, but it can also be a lot of fun. Let’s take a look at Wildstyle and see if it’s right for you.

ON YOUR TURN

A game of Wildstyle is made up of 3 chaotic rounds. From the word “GO”, players will simultaneously draw locations cards from decks places around the play area frantically seeking to build sets. While it is a bit of a push-your-luck task to build these sets, there is actually a lot of instinctive planning that needs to take place to earn your spot in the winners circle.

The game board is made up of individual boards, each made up of smaller, individual hexagons. These boards will come together to form a unique city layout where you’ll attempt to spread your underground artwork. Each player will be given tokens in their own color that will be used to mark their territory. To gain access to these city districts, players will need to draw cards and play them on their personal board. Players can only have 3 cards in their hand at the same time and only 2 locations are available to build sets… so there are plenty of limitations.

Once a player decides to pursue a set, they’ll play that card onto 1 of the 2 spaces on their player board. Once a player builds a stack/set of 3 of that type of card, they’ll be able to play a token in a matching area on the player board. With a limited hand limit of 3 cards, you’ll need to cycle through as many cards as possible in order to achieve your set goals. The play area has designated discard piles to help meet that goal. To play on a discard pile, you’ll need to match the type or color of the previous discarded card. These discarded piles also become share piles if you see a card you need. You can immediately take the top card and place it directly onto your individual player board.

Once you’ve decided to pursue a set, you can’t remove those cards until you’ve finished off the set. If you grow impatient and HAVE to move on from a set, you can take a police token to immediately finish out the set and place a token of your color on the board. These police tokens count against you at the end of the game so you have to be careful.

Speaking of scoring, there are 2 primary ways to score each game. Each type of hex location carries its own unique value. Players will score points per tags/tokens where they have 2 or more adjacent to one another on the board. Any single tag will be removed. Additionally, each game will feature a number of bonus goals that may require a certain pattern to be met. Players will add up their final score and the player with the most points is the winner.

ARTWORK & COMPONENTS

Wildstyle features vibrant, colorful graffiti-style artwork. While it might not appeal to everyone, it’s definitely unique and stands-out in the boardgame world. The production is solid and the components are great. Overall, this is a really good production.

PROS & CONS

➕ Fun theme carries over the gameplay

➕ Fast gameplay keeps everyone on their toes

➕ Relatively easy to teach – good rulebook

➕ Dexterity style game works great for both kids and adults

➕ Solid components should endure wild games

➕ Good replay-ability with various bonus tiles and dual-sided boards

 

➖ Real-time and dexterity games don’t work for everyone

➖ Difficult to catch-up if you fall behind

➖ Requires a couple plays before it all clicks

WHY WOULD YOU LIKE THIS GAME?

Fans of real-time games are going to love this. Once you get the rules down, it’s super easy and you can play it in no time.

WHAT IS THE BEST THING ABOUT THIS GAME?

The best thing about the game is the chaotic nature. Everyone is playing simultaneously, grabbing cards, placing tokens and it’s really a wild time.

FINAL THOUGHTS

It’s important to note I am not a fan of real-time or dexterity games. I like to think through my turns, carefully weigh things out and not have to shove people out of the way to grab the card I want… Under those pretenses, Wildstyle is not a game for me… but it quickly won me over and now I’m questioning my preconceptions about who I am as a board game player.

The simplicity of Wildstyle really drew me in. Real-time games often feel too frantic to me, but the actions come across very smooth and natural. The choices are simple yet really satisfying. Drawing and building card sets scratches that push-your-luck itch I really enjoy. It’s a set collection game, but in a pretty loose sense. The weight really rests on the area control component where you have a good amount of flexibility to adjust as the game unfolds. Different districts in the city score differently and you can hold off to grab higher value spots or you can try to overwhelm your opponents by racing through with more available cards. All-in-all, the choices are a lot of fun.

The publisher claims 40 minutes per game, but we were racing through a game in 15-20 minutes. Players all play simultaneously, so there is little to no downtime.

You get 6 tag tokens per round. The round ends when a player runs out of tokens and any unplayed tags get discarded. This leads into my only real complaint. It can be difficult to catch up when you fall behind early. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s something to consider.

A lot of my enjoyment came from my family’s appreciation of the game. They continue to ask for this one weeks after we first played it. They play a lot of the game Nerts, which is a fast-playing, group, solitaire-style game and Wildstyle brings a similar action. It may seem slightly overwhelming at first, but it’s really well designed and comes together quickly. Gameplay is smooth and intuitive and the games move fast. It has an interesting look and is super easy to set up and teardown which gives it a lot of the intangibles that make for a fun group and party game.

Wildstyle sits in a niche that a lot of board gamers dislike or avoid entirely. That’s kinda where I sit. I typically avoid these types of games, but I’m really glad I got the chance to play this. In fact, this quickly climbed the list of my favorite games from 2022… and no one was more surprised than me. This is a fun, unique experience that does a lot of things right. The accessibility is big-time making this one easy to get to the table. I don’t know if the publisher would consider this a party game, but the energy and response I’ve had playing it with different groups really evokes that atmosphere. If you’re a skeptic when it comes to dexterity/real-time games, I would encourage you to come into this with an open mind. I’m not saying it’ll win you over, but it brings a more positive spin to the genre. You may find yourself pleasantly surprised like I was. If you enjoy those types of games this is right up your alley and you’re going to find a lot to like about Wildstyle.