Around this time last year, I backed Meerkat Kingdoms on Kickstarter, and am pleased to say that earlier this week I received my copy, along with the 5th player expansion, The Watering Hole, a set of coloured faction dice I’d ordered as an add-on, and a bonus ‘gift’ faction of wooden meerkat meeples in a speckled black colour. In fact I actually received two boxes containing the same order, which I believe is most likely a snafu by the fulfilment company (Zatu?).
Anyway, because somewhere along the line the fulfilment has gone awry, Envy Born Games have asked anybody receiving double orders to contact Zatu to get the additional one picked up. Rest assured I will be doing this in due course and am well aware that 50+ backers are not getting their copies because of this, but hey-ho, this is what you can expect to find inside those boxes…
The main Meerkat Kingdoms box is reasonably compact and square, relatively standard as far as smaller boardgame boxes go at 24cm x 24cm x 7cm, but The Watering Hole expansion is significantly smaller (13cm x 13cm x 5cm approx), and both boxes still manage to pack a lot inside them.
Meerkat Kingdoms
The first thing you’ll note is that the main box has its own decent insert to house everything, which includes the Automa board for solo players (which is flipped for scoring at the end of the game), 4 x player boards, 4 x sets of coloured wooden meerkat meeples that include a queen meerkat and an accompanying cardboard scoring token (in blue, orange, green, and yellow), 16 x wooden ‘pup’ cubes, 3 x white dice (plus an additional die for the Automa), 10 x desert tiles, a reference card for the Oasis tokens (which need to be punched out of a tiny board alongside the scoring tokens), a single wooden ‘roving male’ meerkat meeple, and the main rulebook. Oh, there’s also 2 x ridiculously oversized brown and blue cloth bags for those Oasis tokens (see image below). You’ll note there’s no other turn reference cards, etc. because that’s already taken care of on the player boards – a nice touch in my opinion which more games should adopt if they can.
Apart from the stupidly large bags, my only immediate moans are that the box is seriously compact —it’s quite a tight squeeze to fish those player boards out— and those scoring tokens are both tiny and of rather thin cardboard.
Meerkat Kingdoms: The Watering Hole
The expansion offers a fifth faction of wooden pink meerkat meeples, a fold-up player board and the Watering Hole board, 3 x additional Oasis tokens and a pink scoring token, 4 extra pup cubes, a small additional rulesheet, and introduces new Alpha Meerkat meeples.
In terms of set-up, the tokens and pup cubes are added to those in the base game, while the Alpha Meerkats are used to let players put extra meerkats onto the board. The Watering Hole board is an alternative source of points and special actions for the main game, accessible only by rolling and pairing up doubles. I’ve already sought some clarification on how these rules are entwined with the main game, because it’s not made entirely clear in the rules accompanying the expansion.
A few quibbles…
Okay, you probably knew they were coming, but here’s a couple of quibbles I have…
(1) The tokens in The Watering Hole expansion are actually slightly thicker than those in the main game. It might not be that significant in the grand scheme of things, but there’s definitely a noticeable difference.
(2) My complimentary bonus speckled black faction does not include an Alpha Meerkat, although if you opted to buy additional faction colour sets through the original Kickstarter those sets do apparently include one. Again, a minor niggle —they were a bonus— which can be fixed by using the Alpha Meerkat from the faction colour being replaced by speckled black. Hmmm.
(3) The set-up page in the rulebook is incorrect because it shows a ‘2’ desert tile (which is not in the box) and references a ‘3’ desert tile, subsequently rendering the layout shown null and void. I reached out via www.boardgamegeek.com (BGG) on this and to their credit Envy Born Games very quickly posted an updated PDF copy of the rules with the set-up diagram amended. I have put the amended set-up image here (see below), but you can find the complete rulebook on BGG using this link:
Meerkat Kingdoms updated rulebook (PDF)
And finally…
As you may have guessed, I have not actually played Meerkat Kingdoms at time of writing, and despite minor annoyances I am still hopeful and looking forward to getting it to the table sometime soon-ish – I am genuinely keen to see how it plays. I did have some questions, so hopefully my early queries about the game (posted on BGG) will point prospective owners and players in the right direction…
— Alex Bardy, 20Aug26
