Cuteness overload for the whole family

In ✨ Animals Gathering ✨ you play as Mages 🧙, trying to resurrect the magical animals of the forest that have gone extinct due to dark magic. To do this you are conjuring magical stones with the help of dice. It is a family-weight game with some dice rolling, push-your-luck and set collection. Here's how you play! 🙂

On your turn you either roll dice 🎲 to get tiles (the magical stones) which you then put onto your incomplete animal cards, or you grab a new card 🐾 from the display.
There's an interesting mechanic here: the less incomplete cards you have, the more dice you are allowed to roll - ☝️ however shapes you roll that you cannot allocate to any of your cards can be used by your opponents. So you want to work on more cards at the same time, but not too many, or else you roll too few dice.

You also want to cleverly pick cards for yourself, so not all of them require the same shapes. If you fill up a card with all the required shapes, they are considered completed and give you abilities - either permanent or re-activatable ones or end game scoring conditions. So you can choose abilities that work well together, and go for set or color bonuses.

💭 This is a lightweight and accessible family game, and while it might not have much in store for hardcore gamers, there is a surprising amount of strategy in here: When to get new cards, and which ones to pick? Which dice do you roll - as the 3 different dice colors show different magic stone shapes. Which animal do you want to complete first to have some nice ongoing bonuses?

💫 For more variety you can use the 5 mage cards so everyone has asymmetrical player powers, plus you could give everyone 1 of 10 spell cards that offer powerful one-use abilities.
The only thing I'm not convinced about are some of the take-that like card powers. 🙉 It feels bad when your hard-earned magic stones are taken, and it doesn't fit the theme either.

🥰 The art is phenomenal and I love the abstract little animals made up of these shapes. 😍 Rolling the chunky dice and fiddling with the magic stones lends great tactility to the game. The game also comes with a great functional insert!