Co-op Card Game Beasts Just Doesn’t Stand Out

By Keith Law | September 17, 2025 | 1:45pm

Tabletop Reviews board games

Co-op Card Game Beasts Just Doesn’t Stand Out

Beasts is a new cooperative, low-communication game from Clarence Simpson, designer of The Wolves and Merchants of Magick, in a similar vein to The Game and The Mind. It’s a little more involved than either of those two, which succeeded on their simplicity (despite the former’s SEO-unfriendly name… it reminds me of the short-lived British rock band The Music), and ultimately I don’t think it’s as good as The Mind is, instead serving as a sort of diversion if you’re looking for something new and different in that space.

In Beasts, players will try to work through a deck of cards numbered 1 through 9 in eight different suits, which the game represents as the four suits from a regular deck of cards in whole and ‘broken’ varieties. There are also Beast cards in the deck, four in the basic game, which you draw randomly from the eight in the box—one per suit—and which, when they appear, will block you from playing cards of that suit to the column where they land. The goal is to play the entire deck and your hand cards without getting to a point where a player can’t make a legal play. You can never tell other players what cards you have in your hand, although you can give general clues, like saying you’re going to have to play to the hundreds column on your next turn.

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On your turn, you declare any of the four suits (broken and whole don’t matter here), and then play all of the cards in your hand matching that suit. There are three piles on the table that show the hundreds, tens, and ones places of a three-digit number, which starts as 0-0-0. Every card you play must result in a three-digit number that is higher than the one that was there before, so if the number showing is 143 and you want to play a 2, you would have to play it to the hundreds column to make 243, because 123 and 142 would be lower than the number that was already there. If you play a card to the tens column, you can discard all of the cards in the ones pile, resetting that to zero; if you play a card to the hundreds column, you can discard all of the cards in the ones pile and/or in the tens pile.

beasts card board game review

When your turn ends, you draw your hand back up to five cards. If one of those cards is a Beast, you place it on the table in front of you so all other players can see it. When your turn comes back around, you must play the Beast above the ones column, unless the top card there matches the Beast’s suit, in which case you play it above the tens column, unless the top card there matches… and so on. If the top cards in all three piles match the Beast’s suit, you have defeated that particular Beast and discard it. Otherwise, the Beast prevents you from playing new cards matching its suit to the column beneath it for the rest of the game.

You begin the game with three discard tokens shared across all players, which you may use at any time to discard one card from your hand as a bonus action. It doesn’t take the place of your turn, but may allow you to get rid of an unplayable card later in the game, or allow you to discard the last card(s) from your hand when the deck is exhausted to allow you to win.

The basic game, with four Beasts and three discard tokens, is appropriately challenging for family play; I played this with a (smart) six-year-old who had no problem understanding the rules and the numerical comparisons required, and after the first play, he was playing it well enough to win it once and get to the end of the deck a second time. You can adjust the level of difficulty to your group, however, using more or fewer Beasts, or using fewer discard tokens; I imagine with a table of all adults with some experience with this game style, you’ll probably want to use more Beasts.

It’s a fine game, properly balanced, pretty easy to understand, although I’d say the broken/whole suits thing doesn’t need to be in the game at all—they could have just had two cards of each value per suit and called it a day. The art is by Pauliina Linjama, who also did the art for The Wolves; the art itself on the cards is gorgeous, but the numbers and suits aren’t as easy to decipher as they should be because of the color and font choices. It’s just not quite novel enough to knock The Mind or The Gang—both card-based cooperative games with limited communication—off the shelves.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.