Sealing the deal inked by the gameplay is the impeccable atmosphere created by Mantis Falls. Its sepia, typewritten cards are soaked in moonlight and ebbing streetlamps. The few supporting characters encountered by players appear as noir silhouettes, with delightfully pulp descriptions like “Ms Cardello, the woman with volition” and “Mr Edwards, the man with connections”. Events, meanwhile, have terse, evocative names like “purge”, “witch hunt” and “the whistling wind”. With its sparing brushes of theme, it sharply conjures the feeling of crunching along a sidewalk in the cold, dark night, glancing behind you every few steps and listening through the silence for a second set of footsteps.

A good combo for this beast is Roly Poly armor with the sour and spicy staff since the Mantis isn't weak to sour and you can stun it. A swift, sleek assassin found lurking in a flower pot. Resembles a flower with a taste for blood. Drops mantis claw, mantis chunk, and mantis head. Yeah, the whole mantis shrimp theme doesn’t really come through in the gameplay at all. I’m going to assume it’s one of those Oatmeal things that I don’t really get since I don’t actively consume the comic content. It doesn’t bother me in any way; it just doesn’t really have anything to do with the game proper. I like a weird theme, but I also like a weird theme that feels integrated into the gameplay in a way that matters, rather than just a weird theme for the sake of a weird theme. Though, I’ll freely admit that a weird theme for its own sake is still better than a boring one.I do love a colorful game, but I love a colorful game that double-codes its colors for accessibility reasons even more. I appreciate them using symbols and colors together to avoid just using color as the primary way to distinguish cards. It’s a very, very basic accessibility fix, these days, but it’s still nice to see. As the game progresses, score piles will grow. Players must keep their score pile staggered, and they must say the number of cards they have if asked. The first person to collect ten or more Mantis cards in their score pile wins the game immediately. Exploding Kittens, the company behind games like A Game of Cat& Mouthand Zombie Kittens, released Mantis, a colorful card game inspired by the mantis shrimp.

Despite its slight resistance, a Poison build with Widow Armor/ Mother Demon Armor and a Widow Dagger is extremely powerful in the fight. Mantis Falls is a crime thriller set in the 1940s, as two witnesses to a crime (the rulebook leaves it at an ominous “something you were not supposed to see”) look to flee a town under mob rule. Well, you’re told that the other person with you is another witness, anyway. They could actually be the assassin sent to silence you before you escape. Look at the pretty rainbow….look at the pretty rainbo….WAIT!!! WHAT?? Did you just steal my cards??? Mantis needs to come with a warning. DON’T GET DISTRACTED BY THE PRETTY COLOURS! The gorgeous greens, the rich reds, the beautiful bl……NOPE! See? I did it again!To be especially clear, players can only score points by trying to match cards in their own Tank. Even if someone steals one or more cards from another player’s Tank, they can only add these stolen cards to their own Tank on that turn, and not their Score Pile. This means the cards they’ve just stolen can potentially be stolen again before they have a chance to add them to their own Score Pile. Source: Exploding Kittens Is this game fun to play?

There’s been a really interesting trend popping up in board games, lately. I mean, it’s always been present, to some degree, but with the increased prevalence of board gaming societally and the full-court press that Target is trying to pull off in the board game space, you’re starting to see these really intriguing tendrils trying to connect the mass-market and hobby audiences. It’s essentially a gold mine, I suppose, if you can figure out how to get folks moving from the mass-market pool to the hobby pool, but that’s a bit beyond my area of expertise. Just interesting to watch. And so you start seeing more and more games emerge in a really interesting space, as they try to court both audiences, to some degree. I think the folks at Exploding Kittens have been thinking a lot about that space, and so I’ve been intrigued by some of their more recent releases. I’ll be covering a few, so, keep an eye out for those. Here’s one! It’s called Mantis. Let’s see what’s been going on. Once players decide how they are going to play on their turn, they flip over the top card of the draw pile. If they’re trying to score in their own Tank and they flip over a card that matches one or more cards in their Tank, they can move these matching cards and the card they drew to their Score Pile. If there is no match, the new card is added to the player’s Tank and their turn is over. Mantis is the Mario Kart of card games: a potential friendship ruiner. Some people might need a couple of minutes to cool off after intense betrayal. Some might need a couple of hours. Or maybe that is just specific to my friend group and we need to chill. Either way, the short nature of each round really adds to the fun, because hard feelings between players are going to be carried over into each game. What can I say? You were promised a cutthroat game! The players must work their way out of town along a dark road, dealing with the threats they encounter along the way - which may or may not include their companion. | Image credit: Distant Rabbit Games If the player has critical health, use the large trunk for cover by running around it for a healing break.Action cards of the same suit can be comboed together, with players working together - or apart - on each turn. Image: Distant Rabbit Games If you announce that you wish to score, draw the top card from the draw pile. Reveal and place it near your tank. A revealed card that matches the color of any card or cards in your tank allows you to score. Remove the revealed card and the matching cards and add them to your score pile. Did you reveal a new color that does not match? You cannot score. The revealed card is left in the tank. Once you begin to get more than one card of the same color, those cards are kept in a staggered column for all players to see. Play passes left.