game: American Megafauna

[cellio]

Dani and I played a two-player game of American Megafauna. This was my first time playing. It actually worked ok for two players; most multi-player games don't. That's a bonus.

On one foot: you are playing one or more species (a phylum, loosely) 250 million years ago. The board consists of biomes with different characteristics; you acquire DNA that lets you adapt in compatable ways. For example, a biome might require water-tolerance (amphibian) and give extra points to insect-eaters. Or a biome might support anyone but give extra points to creatures that can reach the tall trees. Depending on what cards come into play, you can bid for DNA or for the chance to spin off new species. Random events can throw wrinkles into your plans, most frequently by altering biomes. Scoring is based on the number of counters you can keep alive on the board.

The game has five sets of counters -- not identical, so we chose two at random. I played lizards (purple), and Dani played "dog-face" (yellow, mammal). The game has a basic reptile/mammal split, so I suspect it worked well that we played one of each.

You start with one species and from that can spin off more, inheriting the base characteristics. My base lizard was almost immediately amphibian, so all my derivatives were too. One derivative was aquatic (required water to live in); the others were more flexible. Initially there weren't a lot of marine biomes on the board, which was a problem, but new biomes and climate change helped me out.

Dani, meanwhile, went in for carnivores, at least some of the time. Carnivores don't actually eat other players' counters; it's about balancing species, not individual chits. Carnivores have to be supported by herbivores, but that comes at no cost to the player of the herbivores. That said, most of the herbivores in our game ended up developing armor, making it unprofitable to be a carnivore. (Anti-armor -- you know, stuff like big sharp fangs -- was under-represented in our game.)

Mechanically, each species is represented on your playing mat by a card (about 2x2 inches) and a pile of little cardboard tents to represent acquired characteristics. You can have any characteristic more than once (this means a stronger presence). I don't know what's typical, but we had species in play with a dozen of these little tents, which is more than fits on the card. Because orientation of the card also matters (it indicates your size), this made it a little hard for me to see what was going on on Dani's mat and vice-versa. This was tractable for a two-player game, sitting next to each other; I don't know how well it would work for me across the dining-room table. I was keeping stuff in memory more than looking. If the markers were plastic rather than cardboard, some sort of stacking scheme might have helped with that.

Our events were not well-randomized, though we shuffled thoroughly. So I don't have a sense yet of what that should look like. We had one catastrophe, on the last turn, that caused five of the six species then in play to go extinct. I gather that lesser catastrophes exist.

Our game took about three hours, including teaching, which is a comfortable length. (It means it can play in an evening and not just on a weekend.) The plastic tray that Dani bought helps with chit management, but at the expense of things not fitting well in the box. Speaking of the box, it opens on an end rather than having a conventional lid -- bad choice IMO.

Dani played a draft of the third edition last year at Origins, but that edition has not yet been published. He bought the second edition and its expansion, and downloaded third-edition rules, that that more or less fits together. (That this is so suggests to me that the third edition won't be published as a packaged game.) The rules support a basic game and an advanced one; we played the basic.

Overall, it's a neat game with an unusual concept, and I'd like to play it more. I don't think I have a great feel for it yet, but I like what I've seen so far, aside from some of the physical aspects.

Comments

[ealdthryth.livejournal.com]

That sounds sort of like Quirks. Quirks was more simplistic and silly though. We owned all of the Eon products games. Their most popular was probably Cosmic Encounter. They were all fun and mostly unique for their time (late 70's/early 80's).