Evolution Climate, a boardgame Review
I bought Evolution on a lark. I was standing in the new Gaming Goat store in Vegas and surrounded by so many amazing board games, I felt pressured to buy “something”. Evolution was my choice, and having played it more than any other single game in the last couple months, I’m pleased with my choice.
Evolution is a game by Northstar Games with strong thematic elements and equally strong game play. The game plays somewhat like a deck building game where instead of building the perfect hand of cards, you’re building up the species that you think will give you the best advantage to survive the coming turns. The strategies to win consist of either consuming as much food as possible (the victory condition is determined by how much food each person has successfully eaten by the end of the game), surviving a deadly climate (which you influenced), eating your opponent (or even your own species) to extinction, or usually some combination there of.
You start the game with one species and a hand of cards. Each turn you have to decide which of those cards you will “spend” to generate food and possibly change the climate, which of those cards will give your species new adaptations, and which of those cards will spawn new species/increase the size of a species/or grow the population of a species.
The interactions between the traits, the world, and your competing species is the core of what makes this game feel so amazing. A single deck of cards that elegantly provides such a rich feeling of strategic control over the game is pretty amazing. Combine the elegance of the single deck of cards with the randomness of each game and/or hand, and the game has very high replay value.
Any of you remember SimLife? I loved that game when I was a kid. Evolution evoked similar feelings of joy as I picked the traits I thought would be amazing and then got to see how events unfolded to determine whether I skyrocketed in points or went immediately extinct.
Everything isn’t rosa rubiginosas though, the single deck of cards controlling each round’s experience can get pretty frustrating if one player pulls strongly ahead. In my YouTube game, even though I was just doing some sample rounds, I really felt like Groot would have a lot of trouble catching up to me. I had randomly gotten several traits for surviving an ice age and managed to keep the climate very chilly. If the other player never received a card for changing the climate, they might really struggle to catch up in points.
For that reason, I highly recommend playing with 3+ players. The climate will shift more and one player is less likely to be able to maintain a stranglehold on the game. That isn’t to say 2 player Evolution isn’t fun, its just more likely to end up lopsided towards one or the other player.
Other than that, this game feels very satisfying for every gamer that loved dinosaurs,bugs, or wildlife as a kid. It tickles all the right parts of my brain, and is super fun too!
