Advert: This game was gifted by Charming Games. All opinions are ours and our reviews are always honest.

The river is flooding and cute baby critters need saving! Sounds like a job for the biggest rodent of them all! Let’s play the newly launched Kickstarter from Charming Games, Capybara Crush.

👥 1 to 4 players
⌛  20 to 45 minutes
🧠 8 years+

Gameplay overview:

Capybara Crush is a puzzly little card drafting/placement game, where players are using their capybaras to save critters from a flooding river. You start with 3 capys lined in front of you and 1 river card in your hand. Each river card has 3 cute critters (or yuzu fruit, of course!) stacked on top of one another, and a capy on the back of the card.

Side note: If you’re wondering why yuzu fruit are featured, capys are known to enjoy warm yuzu baths:

On your turn, choose a card to ‘save’ from the river row and add to your hand. Then, select a card from your hand (either the new one or the old card you already had in hand) to play in front of you. You can play the card either face up on a capybara, or face down to add a new capy to your herd line. The aim is to make chains of matching critters/backgrounds along your capy line to score points. And you can’t change the order once placed – unless you use a power that is…

Each player starts with 3 stars that can be spent on special powers to help them with their critter collecting, from refreshing the river row to moving cards in their capy herd line. Once spent, you only get a star back when you place a new capybara in your line. So spend wisely!.

The game instantly ends when a player starts their turn with 8 capys in their line, all carrying critters. Points are scored for:

• your longest chain of each critter
• your longest chain of each background
• favourite critters in your herd line (these are randomly assigned at the start of the game)
• any leftover stars.

Solo mode

In solo mode, you’re going up against a nasty ‘AI’ that’s stealing critters from the river for vague nefarious purposes! Oh no!

Gameplay is similar to multiplayer but with a few key changes. Instead of 3 capybaras, you start with 5 capys and 5 stars, and no favourite animal.The AI doesn’t have a capybara line, but does have 3 randomly selected favourite animals.

On your turn you take a card from the river row as normal. But when selecting a card to play, you can only play them face up as critters – you can’t add more capybaras to your line. And no new capys means once you spend stars, there’s no way to get them back.

On evil AI’s turn they steal TWO cards from the river – the two that were either side of the card you just picked. They get a point for each favourite animal on the cards they steal.

When your capys are full, you score up as normal (except you only score for chains of 3 or more!). Then you reset your capys and start a new game. Your aim is to beat the AI’s score at the end of 3 games.

Our thoughts:

I didn’t think capys could get any more adorable, but Capybara Crush is here to prove me wrong! This artwork is super cute. And I love the little player tokens – capybaras on different floaties! I can’t decide if the flamingo or the unicorn is my favourite.

Capy Crush is easy to learn and play – thanks to a lovely rulesheet with illustrated examples. Each turn you’re analysing the best cards and star power combos to play to keep your chains growing. It’s puzzly but simple enough for most people to play and enjoy. There are some occasions where there’s opportunity to ‘hate draft’ river cards – like if there’s nothing you like, and/or you’re just after a card to put down as a capy. I did this a few times when I was more familiar with the game.

The game has multiple variant rules. I liked that you could play with favourite critters open or hidden (in my opinion hidden is slightly better).There’s various powers to choose from at set up which can add some variability to the game (there’s definitely some powers that I prefer over others!). They range in cost (1-3 stars), which can also modify the difficulty. And there’s a few different game modes: standard, solo, draftybara (combining multiple decks for more players), and trickybara (rules TBC but it involves trick-taking yay!).

Each turn you’re analysing the best cards and star power combos to play to keep your chains growing. It’s puzzly but simple enough for most people to play and enjoy.

I liked how the solo mode is more thinky, because you’re balancing which card to take from the river with what points that will give the AI (sometimes I wouldn’t pick the best card for me, because the cards on either side would give the AI heckin’ points). But it is SO HARD to beat the AI! I know that’s intentional, but it’s a bit too frustrating for me, and less chill than multiplayer mode. So, even though I enjoy the brainteasing, it’s not a game I would choose to play solo often.

The production is well thought out and makes it easy to keep all in one small box, e.g. the double sided nature of the cards. The tokens are nice and thick, and the cardboard you’d normally throw out once the tokens are popped is instead used to keep the tokens safe. My only niggles are that the surfboard capy player token is a little too large for the score track. And I would prefer more colour variety for the star tokens to better tell player colours apart – at the moment there’s pink, white, light brown and dark brown (why not blue for the surfboard?). An additional subtle signifier might also be helpful for colourblind players.

Capybara Crush is an enjoyable puzzly game that covers the 3 all-important Cs: Cute, Cozy, Capys!

We were sent the pocket-sized edition for this review – perfect for taking out and about. The Kickstarter edition is a deluxe version and looks slightly larger but still portable. I believe the only other difference is the Kickstarter version has deluxe tokens. The Kickstarter also has the most adorable capy plushie that doubles as storage for your game and I WANT IT SO BAD.

Final verdict:

Capybara Crush is an enjoyable puzzly game that covers the 3 all-important Cs: Cute, Cozy, Capys! There’s enough bite to the puzzliness to make it feel satisfying, without taking away from the easygoing capy vibes (despite the game involving critters fighting for life in a raging river…so cozy, haha). Our friends loved this one so I think it’s going to be a go to gamenight filler going forward. Dylan, the designer, crushed it! (see what I did there?!) 

Capybara Crush launched on Kickstarter this week, you can check it out here!