So your family is tired of riding the rails of Ticket to Ride? Of hording the gems of Splendor? Or wanting to move past the Stone Age? You may want to check out Creature Comforts.

Creature Comforts is a light weight game that is very easy to learn and fun to master. It’s a game of building your lovely woodland homes/town through use of dice, worker placement, with some push-your-luck aspects, set collection, and resource management. This is all with the goal of making it the perfect cozy Winter Hide-away.

The good of the game:
It’s light weight and easy to learn. Outside of a few little snippets, I had the core gameplay down in one playthrough and then it was just about figuring out what would work best in any situation. The art is approachable while not overwhelming the board or cards and the wooden components are nice. It is already family friendly, no additional rules need be dropped nor added to make it kid friendly. It’s very satisfying to  have your plan fire off, which may require a good dice roll or strategically saving your + / – tokens. The game has a good flow of actions and is very approachable to kids 9-10+ so it makes for a solid edition to any family game collection. Keep in mind you know your kids best, so that’s just a loose estimate. The game itself didn’t feel like a huge table hog either. I also really loved the push-your-luck aspect! As well as the protection from bad luck with the +/- tokens.

The Neutrals (May be a positive or a negative to you):
Set up time is a bit lengthy for the game’s difficulty. The Solo mode was not engaging, it was your standard ‘beat your score’ style. There is very little to no player interaction, no one can prevent you from actions and while I loved that, my friend did not.

Some of the draw-backs I’ve found:
The game takes much longer the more players you have, as players need to put thought into actions, this can lead to some pretty harsh analysis-paralysis that can be grating to players who want something more fast paced. Again, not a deal breaker just something to consider. Sometimes your bad luck can really compound and there’s little relief for it outside of a little future protection, the dice don’t always play nice and you don’t always get what you need to build onto your home area in a way that will keep you competitive.

Overall:
This is a great game and a great addition to any library that welcomes games like Everdell, Wingspan and Flamecraft. I loved how approachable it is and the dice were a welcome change to the usual “Place Worker, Get Resource.” I think the biggest draw back to the game is honestly how long it is, so if you can play it shorter, do so. But I still highly recommend this game, it’s a very good time and a very ‘nice’ competitive game.