Hi. I have not played a full playthrough of this game -- i only set up and messed about with the boardstate for a bit; this is not a review of how the game feels when played, please treat as more of an unboxing video.

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A cute, savannah-themed lawnmower game.

Dynamics
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Depth is as surprising as a hippo's maw (and just as toothy). I love the color-dependent boardstate and the characteristic charm of the different cubes' powers. The fact that 1 to a dozen people can share control of the 4 hippos without any mechanical deficit to the gameplay is fantastic and dizzyingly sophisticated.

Maintenance
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For setup, t game asks you to draw one piece at a time from a cloth sack. I got bored of that immediately and just poured the whole contents of the tin out into the middle in a pile and slid to farthest square the piece landing nearest to it until every piece occupied its own square.

Theme
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The game doesn't lean heavily enough into its theme to either a) grab/unlock/invite me or b) explain these hippos' seemingly supernatural hyperdimensional, world-manipulating powers*.
 
* * ^(Disclosure: I note that "hype" seems to sadly equate itself as "good" in my head lately, so i'm likely treating the names of the actions in this game unfairly when i judge them to be underexpressed.)

Clarity
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It's a puzzle game on a chess board. Talk about the right tool for the job! Self-explainatory. Good.

The Slide action does not clarify what the cubes have to be adjacent to: each other or to the player or to any player or anywhere on the board to be slide? Although this is a cooperative puzzle game, i had not thought of last option as a possibility until writing this sentence out.

* Since Move is placed before Slide on the list of actions, i am happy to think the ability to Slide is dependant on at least 1 piece to be slid to be orthogonal to the player.

Setup diagram has player pieces set as far as possible from their home zone, but the instructions do not explicitly state either this or for players to set up the board _exactly_ as shown in the diagram.

Crunch
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Love how the difficulty naturally scales with each move. The options feel inconsequential at first and reach a climatic chock relatively quickly, inviting further playthroughs in succession, the way tictactoe is normally enjoyed.

I will always be confused as to why i can't move diagonally; this makes me anxious and resistant to playing any movement-based game on a square grid, which naturally makes me resistant to teaching other people*.

* Square grids are the best grids, though; so i think a chipper middle is something to the effect of "When you chose to move diagonally, you overexert yourself and may not perform any other actions this turn. Are you sure you want to proceed?"

Daunting how there's 4 actions and 4 powerups to [juggle | pick from | keep track of] and no player aid; with the right graphic designer, this would be no problem to have scribbled in a column beside the provided danger slider. For now, for selecting actions, i fear them quietly.

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Bugs
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In the version i've reviewed, there's a non-zero chance the hippos are surrounded by the right cubes at the start of the game and you have you reset the 64-piece board all over again