Life of a Chameleon Review

I never knew I needed chameleon meeples, chameeples, meepeleons? in my life.

Life of a Chameleon is a game which has players trying to eat bugs and avoid snakes all while changing their own colors to do so. The game plays over a variable amount of rounds and players are trying to complete as many objectives as possible in that time. On your turn, you roll the dice and add bugs to the board depending on the sector and color. You then can do three actions. If you move, you will move your chameleon marker but be careful, you cannot move on a space that has a snake that is a different color and if you land on a space with different colored bugs they will scatter. You can move a snake to get it out of your way or put it in front of your opponents to slow them down. You can choose to change your chameleons color by choosing one of the available color cards or drawing blind. You then put the card in front of you and swap your chameleon for the corresponding one. The last thing you can do is lie in wait. This is essentially staying put but you get to roll the dice to place more bugs so it can be a huge help. When objectives are completed by eating the bugs on the card, a D4 is rolled and the tracker is moved that many spaces. When it reaches the end of the track, the game ends and the player with the highest score wins.

The Good: The chameleon meeples are fantastic. I love that they're multicolored to signify more than one color on the board. The gameplay loop itself is also really nice. There's a constant sense of urgency because you don't know when the game will actually end. Once you get within a dice roll it's so tense every time an objective is completed.

The Okay: I do wish that there was a little bit more to do with the snakes other than creating roadblocks or mildly inconveniencing the other players. If players were able to move them in a way that may force them to cause opponents to go back to the middle or roll a die to determine where they should go I think that would have been a better use.

The Not So Good: I loved the color changing aspect of the game but it was also insanely inconvenient at times. If the color you need isn't available to you, you don't know how long it'll be before it is going to come up. This really forces you to constantly need to be pivoting.

Overall: 7.5/10

I really liked Life of a Chameleon. It does not reinvent the genre but it does some things really well. Having to be aware of your surroundings at all times and looking out for certain colors or opportunities to slow down the other players is really well done. This is a game that I can't wait to play with my girls as they get a little bit older.