Wildstyle Review

I tend to like real-time board games—I've said as much when I previously reviewed FUSE and Illiterati—but when I first heard about Wildstyle, there was something about it that really intrigued me. A gamer's take on classic card games like Spit and Speed, except with a set collection twist and an area control twist on top of that? Count me in!

Wildstyle is honestly one of a kind. If you like real-time card games, you'll probably like this one... and even if you don't, you might still like it! Because it's not a speed game. It's strategic with real-time action, and the real-time action is refined enough to not be mindless card shedding.

Here's how my own experiences with Wildstyle have been, whether it's fun, what I like and don't like about it, and everything else you need to know to decide whether this is a game you'll enjoy as well.

This review is based on my own personal copy of Wildstyle, which I bought used from BGG's GeekMarket. Not a free review copy.

In this review:

• Overview
• Setup and Table Footprint
• Learning Curve
• Game Experience
  • Decision Space
  • Luck Factor
  • Fun Factor
  • Pacing
  • Player Interaction
    • A Note on Cheating
  • Player Counts
• Replayability
• Production Quality
• The Bottom Line

Overview

Wildstyle is first and foremost a real-time set collection card game, but it also has an extra layer of area control on top. All of this makes Wildstyle feels pretty counter to most games with these mechanisms. It's a weird concoction of gameplay that shouldn't work, yet actually works quite well.

At the core of Wildstyle is a deck of cards in eight suits, where each suit represents a location in the city: Police Stations, Parks, Industrial, Downtown, Shopping, Residential, Train Stations, and Railways. The idea is to draw cards from a central deck and play them to your personal board, trying to create sets of three cards of the same location type. When you complete a set, you get to place one of your "tags" on a city space matching the location type.

But here's the twist: all of this happens in real time. There are no turns in Wildstyle. You draw from the deck when you want, you play cards when you want, and when you complete sets, you place tags on the city board right away. It's sort of a speed game, but also not—there are other things to think about in Wildstyle and speed isn't always the best play.

Different location types are worth more points than others, like Police Stations being worth 4 points, Residentials being worth 2, and Railways being worth 1. Meanwhile, the higher value locations have fewer cards and fewer spots on the board, so they're harder to tag. For example, with two Police Stations versus three Residentials versus six Railways on the board, are you going to pursue the Police Stations at the risk of someone else completing their Police Station sets faster, leaving you unable to tag them?

Wildstyle also has scoring objectives. From the 12 total scoring objectives, you randomly draw 3 at the start. These are additional ways to score points on top of the individual board spots, and they often have you thinking about the board in different ways. For example, one objective rewards having a long line of tags on the board, another rewards having a full triangle on the board, another makes Railways in a district worth a lot more if you've tagged a Train Station in the same district, etc.

Not only that, but you need to avoid having "solo" tags. At the end of the game, any of your placed tags that are alone—meaning there are no adjacent tags in your color—get removed prior to scoring. So, not only are you trying to aim for the valuable spots, you're also trying to "clump" your tags so they stay on the board and remain eligible to score.

There's another wrinkle in this game: you have a hand limit of 3 cards and you can only work on two sets maximum at a time. Meaning, if you play a Police Station card and a Downtown card, you're committing yourself to completing a set of Police Stations and a set of Downtowns. Until one of those sets is completed, you can't start another one—so you're locked in and all you can do is hope to draw and play Police Stations and Downtowns. And your chances at that happening are pretty slim...

So, what do you do if you've started two sets, your hand is full, and you can't play anything anymore? Fortunately, you have another option: you can discard cards from your hand to communal "share piles." Anyone can discard at any time to any of the share piles. The only rule is, when you discard to a share pile, the card you're discarding has to match either the color or location type of the top card on that pile. (There are either three or four share piles, depending on the number of players.)

Notice that they're called "share piles," not "discard piles." Because these piles aren't just for discarding. You can actually take cards, too! At any time, you can take the top card of any share pile and add it to one of your sets in progress (or start a new set with it, if you have room). So, you can discard from your hand to a share pile, and you can take from a share pile to one of your sets. Whatever you discard can be used by others, and vice versa.

There's one last thing you can do in Wildstyle: you can rush an incomplete set that only has one or two cards. When you rush a set, you get to place a tag on the board like normal, but you have to take a Cop Car token as a penalty. At the end of the game, for each Cop Car you have, you have to remove one of your tags (your choice) from the board prior to scoring.

So, to recap, Wildstyle is played in real time. You have a hand of up to 3 cards, and you can do any of the following actions at any time:

• Play a card from your hand to one of your two available sets.
• Discard a card from your hand to a matching share pile.
• Take a card from a share pile and add it to one of your sets, or start a new set with it if you don't have two sets in progress.
• Complete a set and place a tag on a corresponding spot on the city board.
• Rush an incomplete set to place a tag, but take a Cop Car as a penalty.

Wildstyle plays over three rounds, and every player gets six tags at the start of each round, so you get to place a total of 18 tags over the course of one entire game. A round ends as soon as the draw deck is depleted OR when any player runs out of tags to place. At that point, you can keep working on sets in progress (by playing cards, taking from share piles, etc.) but you can't start any new sets. If you have unused tags, you can carry them over to the next round (in addition to the six new tags you get every round).

After three rounds, the end game happens: players remove tags for each Cop Car they have, then remove any solo tags, then score up the special objectives they've completed and the values of each tag they've placed. Whoever has the highest score wins!

Setup and Table Footprint

Wildstyle isn't exactly a pull-out-and-play-right-away sort of game, but it's relatively simple to set up. The box insert keeps everything organized, so it's easy enough to go through setup as you pull stuff from the box.

Long story short, you'll need to: randomly select modular boards and put them together, randomly select which three objectives will be in play, distribute player boards and tags, shuffle up the deck, then split the deck and take out the unused portion (depending on player count). All in all, it takes about 5 minutes from box to table.

Wildstyle takes up some table space, but it's not egregious about it. One player board per player, plus draw decks, share piles, and Cop Car tokens around the table within reach. The only thing is that the modular city board also uses one board per player, so it's small with only two players but sizable with five players. All in all, though, if you're cramped on a standard 3-feet-by-3-feet card table, you'll still be able to play Wildstyle. It'll just be tight.

Learning Curve

Wildstyle is mechanically pretty simple—it's just set collection and area control—and the learning curve is helped along by the inclusion of helpful player aid cards that explain all your possible actions and act as a scoring reference. But Wildstyle isn't a light or widely accessible game; it's more of an entry-level hobbyist game. It's gamery enough that I'd hold back from introducing it to non-gamers.

Also, expect to lose during your first game, maybe even your first few games. While the rules of Wildstyle are easy to pick up, you have to internalize everything if you want to perform well—it is, after all, a real-time game where every second counts. Fumbling over your actions or struggling to read the city board while everyone else zips by you is going to put you at an obvious disadvantage. That's the nature of real-time gameplay.

Game Experience

Decision Space

On paper, Wildstyle sounds like it has good potential for strategic decision-making. And it's true! I've found Wildstyle generally does reward the player who plays smarter rather than faster. That's why I say that while Wildstyle might be a real-time game, but it isn't a speed game.

There's one layer of strategy in deciding which cards to go after. The lower value locations are more common, so you're more likely to complete your sets... but you miss out on points. And vice versa! You can go after the higher value locations, but other players are probably gunning for them as well... and you might all end up stuck with incompletable sets.

Wildstyle's 115-card deck is comprised of:

• 20x Railway (1 point)
• 14x Train Station (1 point)
• 15x Residential (2 points)
• 15x Downtown (2 points)
• 15x Shopping (2 points)
• 13x Industrial (3 points)
• 13x Park (3 points)
• 10x Police Station (4 points)

While the differences may not seem so big when listed like that, you have to remember that the entire deck isn't in play. At the start of every round, a chunk of cards are removed. (In two players, half the deck is left out.) So, if you burn through the deck looking for the exact cards you need, you won't have many cards left to draw for completing further sets.

And remember you only get six tags per round, meaning you can only complete six sets. It's safer to tag a bunch of Railway, Downtown, and Shopping locations, but the points you miss out on add up fast. It's a delicate balance between risk versus reward, to make sure you're able to complete all your sets while making them worth as many points as you can get.

Meanwhile, you have to keep an eye on the share piles. If tons of Industrials are being discarded, you can swoop in, take them all, and instantly finish an Industrial set. Unplaced tags are worthless at the end, so you want to avoid that as much as possible—and what better way to catch up and throw tags on the board than by exploiting what others have tossed?

There's another layer of strategy in deciding where to place your tags. Area control is the name of the game and you need to build out your territory faster and more effectively than your opponents. That means tagging the locations that best fulfill the randomly chosen scoring objectives.

For example, the "Straight Shooter" objective scores for having a straight line of five tags. Which line of five locations on the city board are you going to aim for? Are you going to pursue a line of high-value locations that might be fought over? Or a line of low-value locations that'll be ignored by others?

Or the "Zone Control" objective, which scores for every cluster of at least three tags. This one incentivizes you to create lots of tag clusters around the city, which gives you more freedom as to where you can place tags. Or the "Urban Planner" objective, which scores per tag for the location type you have the most tags of. This one obviously incentivizes you to specialize in one location type, but which one? The right answer isn't always clear.

Not to mention you can block your opponents! If you see someone trying to create a long line or form a certain shape of tags (like for the "Tricorners" objective), you can get in their way—and if you can do so while bolstering your own points, even better.

There's another layer of strategy in deciding how to use Cop Cars to your advantage. In fact, if you want to get good at Wildstyle, you really need to become a master of rushing sets. (To recap, you can rush an incomplete set in exchange for a Cop Car token, and each Cop Car token forces you to lose one of your placed tags at the end of the game.) It's a double-edged sword that gives you so much control over the city board while also giving you just enough rope to hang yourself if you aren't careful.

For starters, rushing a set lets you free up your player board to work on another set. It's great for when you realize you've backed yourself into a corner and probably won't be able to finish one of your sets. (Maybe everyone, including you, is going for Police Stations.) Rushing a set allows you to pivot and adapt so you don't fall behind in tags.

Rushing is also a good way to secure points. Why struggle to collect three high-value location cards (i.e., Police Stations, Industrials, Parks) when you can just play one card, rush the set, and move on? Sure, you'll have to pay for it with a tag elsewhere, but you can use low-value sets (i.e., Railways) to get those throwaway tags on the board. And if you're smart, you'll place those throwaway tags on spots that mess up someone else's plans.

Having trouble with the scoring objectives? Or worried that someone's going to get in your way and block you? You can rush a set to secure that, too. It's better to lose a 1-point Railway tag to pay for a rushed tag that completes the 9-point "Bestagon" objective, for example.

But again, you have to be careful. You only get 18 tags over the course of the entire game and each rushed set reduces that by 1, effectively reducing your total scoring potential. If you're too fast and loose about it, you're only going to hamstring yourself and come out far behind.

Luck Factor

Wildstyle has one huge negative for me, and it's enough to make me knock it down a point or two. It has to do with luck.

At the start of every round, the 115-card deck first gets shuffled up, then it gets split into several piles... and some of those piles are left out of the round. For example, in a two-player game, the deck is split in half and you only use one half. That's 50 percent of the cards in play and 50 percent unused. For three players, 66 percent of the cards are used. For four players, 75 percent. And for five players, 100 percent.

That means you could be chasing after cards that simply don't exist. It's entirely possible that all but one of the Police Station cards got shuffled into the unused pile, and here you are, trying to complete a Police Station set, waiting for more cards that are never coming. You simply don't know which cards are in or out (unless you're playing with five players).

For a game about strategic area control, it's honestly baffling to me that this kind of luckiness made it through. I know, I know... I can just rush the set, right? But I shouldn't be forced to rush a set—which is pretty punishing in the grand scheme—due to something I have zero knowledge about. I'm essentially pushing my luck on how far I want to hold out before bailing on a set, except I have no way to know what my odds are. It's deeply unsatisfying and frustrating to hold out for cards that just don't exist.

Fun Factor

Despite all the stuff I wrote in the "Decision Space" section above, I find that it's a bit too much to think about during real-time gameplay. I'm mostly focused on the frantic drawing and discarding of cards, on the ever-changing share piles, and on the evolving city board. I go into every round with a general strategy, but it falls apart as soon as I'm handling the cards.

But Wildstyle is fun. It's active, it's pretty high energy, and it's constantly propelled by forward progress. I might have some semblance of a strategy, but honestly I shut my brain off and play by gut most of the time. There's just something engaging about it, and I love the occasional outbursts of harmless frustration when someone gets blocked on the map or is waiting for a card that never shows. Plus, there's the basic satisfaction of completing sets of cards. For all those reasons, Wildstyle hooks me.

Pacing

There's no downtime in Wildstyle. Well, at least during the real-time parts. You do have to gather all the cards in between rounds and shuffle them up again for the next. But that momentary reprieve is welcome, allowing players to re-assess the board and alter their strategies. That back and forth—of real-time rush and taking a breather—is quite nice.

Wildstyle is always moving forward, and with that comes ever-tightening tension. The board fills up, your options dwindle away, and you end up fighting over what spots remain. Who can finish their sets faster? Who's going to be blocked? And you never fully know who's in the lead, so you always have reason to stay in it and pull out a win.

Plus, it's short and sweet. Games typically end before the half hour mark, and I've even had games as fast as 15 minutes when players really burn through the draw deck in search of a specific card. The end-of-game scoring takes a few minutes to count up, but it's not bad at all if you have a sheet of paper. (No scorepad included, sadly.)

Player Interaction

Most of the interaction in Wildstyle is direct by way of the share piles. You throw away stuff and others grab it. They throw away stuff and you grab it. The constant share pile exchange fuels a lot of the action.

And, of course, there's some direct interaction when players block each other on the city board. While I wouldn't call it mean, per se, it can feel bad when you're right on the cusp of completing an objective only to have it snatched away from you by someone who rushed a set just to spite you. But "big" moments like that are uncommon. Normally, you get blocked, you shrug it off, and you keep tagging what you can.

A Note on Cheating

As with all real-time board games, players can accidentally cheat in Wildstyle. Maybe they discard to a mismatched pile. Maybe they draw too many cards to their hand. Maybe they place a tag in the wrong spot. There's a lot that can fly under the radar because everyone's too busy focused on their own action—and players might even do these things intentionally. But whether it's deliberate or not, you (most likely) aren't going to catch it... and you have to be okay with that.

Player Counts

Wildstyle plays with one district board per player, which combine to form the central city board—as player count goes up, the overall city board gets bigger. And since you can place tags anywhere, having a bigger board means more options and flexibility, especially when trying to complete scoring objectives. For example, it's easier to create a "Bestagon" because there's more likely to be clumps of neglected spots where you can swoop in and claim.

Of course, you're also up against more players who can block you at a moment's notice. In fact, the action is naturally more chaotic with more players, with more cards flying around, with tags popping up all over the place, with share piles constantly changing. More players means more energy and I find it harder to keep up with it all. Meanwhile, more players also means more of the deck is used in a round, so you see more of the cards and aren't as impacted by what I discussed in the "Luck Factor" section above.

Ultimately, Wildstyle is more tactical and strategic at two players, more fun and exciting and hectic at five players. If the area control aspect of the game matters a lot to you, stick with two or three players; if you prefer to play this in shut-off-your-brain-and-just-have-fun style, the more the merrier. For me, I enjoy it at all counts but the sweet spot is three or four.

Replayability

I enjoy Wildstyle enough and I personally don't mind playing it over and over again. But you have to realize that it boils down to a real-time, frenetic rush of drawing, playing, and discarding cards. That's ultimately all you're doing, and it's liable to feel "samey" after several games. If you're the kind of person who enjoys Spit enough to play multiple times in a row, then you'll probably like this one as well.

That said, Wildstyle does have a few things going for it to help offset that "samey" feeling from game to game. The modular city boards shake up the area control puzzle, so you have to re-assess every game and figure out the best strategy for the given layout. That combines with the randomized scoring objectives, which further influence your strategic approach to tagging the city. For me, that's enough to keep things fresh between plays.

Do I want to play it all the time? No, not really. But am I always down to play when someone suggests it? For sure! Real-time set collection is like comfort food to me, and the extra layer of area control on top just makes it that much more interesting. Despite its flaws, I have fun with Wildstyle—and it's so quick, I usually play two or three times in a row when it comes out.

Production Quality

Wildstyle's production is pretty good. I was impressed at first glance, and it's a looker on the table for what's ultimately a simple game. But a few (minor) flaws niggled at me across several replays. Here's the good and bad.

I like the card designs and player boards. Wildstyle made the cards easy to parse, even from a distance, which is great because these cards are flying around the table with real-time play. I also appreciate the player boards, which make it clear how many sets each player has in progress. I do wish the cards were a smidge thicker, but they're serviceable as is.

I love the tag chips. The colors are vivid and easy to distinguish, and they feel great to handle—smooth with a touch of texture, plus rounded edges. They're translucent, which helps with seeing through to the spots they've covered, but they aren't completely translucent. They have a matte haze to them, which I really like, and it makes them look like gummies. (I have a hard time resisting the urge to eat them.)

My biggest complaint is with the city boards. They're too busy, especially for a real-time game. Each area type has its own color, but the colors don't stand out enough at a glance, and what's worse is that the colors bleed across hexes, making it that much harder to discern what each spot is. I also wish the icons were clearer and easier to differentiate during the frantic chaos of set collecting. This part seriously detracts from the experience.

And then there's the theme. I don't care that much about the idea of being graffiti artists tagging up a city, but I also know some people who are totally turned off by it—and those people aren't going to play no matter what. The overall aesthetics of Wildstyle are great with all the color and pop, so it's a shame that it's all dragged down by its contentious theme.

If there's one thing I've noticed about Pandasaurus Games, it's that they have great box inserts and rulebooks. That was the case with Dinosaur Island: Rawr 'n Write (one of my favorite games) and that's also the case here. Wildstyle packs up cleanly into a reasonably sized box, and the rulebook is good at both teaching the game and being a quick reference.

The Bottom Line

When I want real-time action, Wildstyle hits the spot. No other game gives me quite the same blend of fun, energy, and strategy. It's neither mindless nor thinky, neither simple nor complex. It's flawed, but it's like comfort food to me. If you like real-time games, consider giving this one a try.

Buy it from:
Amazon • Miniature Market • Noble Knight Games

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