💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › phlog › board-and-card-games.txt captured on 2022-07-16 at 15:55:41.
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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