Board and card games

There have been posts recently[1,2] where people have been

recommending board and/or card games. I have a strange kind of

relationship to modern board and card games, where I generally enjoy

myself on the occasions that I play them, but I still somehow can't

really get into them. I'm woefully unqualified to offer a "top 3",

because that's just barely less than the number of games I've played

more than once, and a lot of the games I know are extremely well-known

and not going to be interesting or novel for anybody to read about.

But, I thought I'd contribute to this phlog theme by writing about one

board game, and that's Evoltion, by North Star Games[3].

Evolution is a game about reproducing and not starving. Each player

has a set of ficticious animal species, and in each round all the

different species are competing for a share of limited food resources.

The larger one of your specie's population size is, the more food it

needs in a round to prevent some of the population dying off from

starvation. Each species can have up to three active traits at any

one time, and these traits bestow different abilities, advantages and

disadvantages when it comes to getting some of the limited plant food

that's on offer, eating other player's species in lieu of plant food,

or defending against being eaten by other species. You get to choose

those traits, and you can replace old traits by new traits whenever

you like, as long as your total is always below three. Thus, your

species evolve over time, giving the game its name.

The mechanics of the game are relatively simple, but I think it's a

relatively rich game (maybe not by board game geek standards, though).

Which traits will make a species successful or not depends in part of

which traits the other species currently have, which can change at any

time, so different evolutionary niches can open and close as the game

progresses. Some real ecological concepts are present in the game, at

least in cartoon form. Species which are "too good" at eating and

reproducing can easily outstrip the resources available to them and

begin starve off, so you need to be careful about maintaining balance.

You can't play it too safe, though, because at the end of the game the

winner is whoever's species collectively ate the most throughout the

course of the game - including their species which went extinct, so

sometimes it pays off to go out in a blaze of glory.

It's a pretty fun game, which rewards thinking about and strategising,

but which isn't hugely complicated, overly detailed or hard to learn.

Officially you can play with only two people, but I've never played it

with less than three, and I think the game is probably more enjoyable

with at least three players. It's not super portable, but it's not

gigantic either. I don't really know how it stacks up to other games

you can get for a similar price, but if you like the sound of the

above I don't think you could go too far wrong picking it up.

[1] gopher://baud.baby:70/0/phlog/fs20190528.txt

[2] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20190529-board-games

[3] https://www.northstargames.com/products/evolution