Game review: Evolution

What is Evolution?

Your goal in a game of evolution is (perhaps not surprisingly) to evolve your species and ensure that they survive.  Each player begins the game with a single species and must carefully manage the available food resources to grow their population size.  Of course, in order to maximize the opportunities for food and growth, your species can evolve by generating new traits such as ‘defensive herding’ which stops them being attacked by carnivores unless they have a greater population size, or ‘long neck’ which allows your species to ‘reach’ to extra plant-based food.  The winner is the player with the biggest evolved populations who have gathered the most resource.

Is it Fun?

It certainly is! The game is a very well-balanced strategy of resource management. The pieces are beautiful and the central watering hole with all the food resources littered around adds to the competitive side of the game. Each turn you want to increase your population size but must make sure you have food resources to feed them or you risk extinction!  This must be balanced with the need to ‘evolve’ your species with new traits to grab the available food or stave off the attentions of predators.  We found you can be quite outraged when your large population of long-necked symbiotic creatures is attacked by neighbouring (or even your own) carnivores.

Is it Educational?

If you are looking at this game to provide an overview of evolution, then you will be disappointed.  The game mechanics and theme align to evolutionary principles, but the education value stop there.  However! The game has great attention to detail.  There is an explanation of evolution at the start of the game and accurate use of scientific terminologies such as predation, herbivore, and extinction throughout.  The evolution and allocation of positive traits is a stretch on reality, but the traits themselves are well-considered.  For example, ‘burrowing’ means the species cannot be attacked by carnivores if it has enough food, but if they need to forage they are placing themselves at risk.

Conclusion

An entertaining and fun resource game that has you caring and fighting over your fictional evolutionary creations.  Works best with four players and the great news is a digital version of the game has just been released! Perfect for lockdown.

Dr Louise Robinson is Lecturer in Forensic Biology and Dr Ian Turner an Associate Professor in Learning and Teaching, both at the University of Derby.