[games] first look: Origins, Bios Megafauna

[cellio]

A few years ago Dani bought a copy of American Megafauna, which I have written about before. The idea is that it's 250 million years ago and the players are playing proto-lizards and proto-mammals competing for viability in a world that's still changing due to things like ice ages and continental drift. The game concept is interesting but overall I found the game mechanics and physical set-up too challenging for the amount of enjoyment the game provided, so I stopped playing. Dani wasn't as frustrated as I was, but he did agree that the game was broken in some ways. So we ended up not playing it much, even at larger game days where it seemed possible to find four people interested in playing it.

There had been rumors of an impending new edition for a while, and when it opened for pre-order Dani went ahead and did so despite the early reports from play-testing. Basically, as I understand it, the play-testers were saying that some things needed to be changed, but the publisher really wanted to hit a deadline (a particular gaming convention) so he went ahead anyway, apparently with the idea that he could publish rules updates. Not auspicious, but Dani is more willing to invest the effort to figure these things out, so more power to him.

Meanwhile, at Origins this year Dani saw or heard about another game by this designer: in this one the players are various hominids competing to see who gets to be homo sapiens. Do you detect a theme? :-) Origins: How We Became Human was published a few years ago, and Dani ordered a copy.

We've played each game once, so it's too early to draw conclusions, but some notes:

The BoardGameGeek blurb for Origins reads:

The game traces the development of early human species from 120,000 years ago through to the near-modern era. Players take the role of Peking Man, Archaic Homo Sapiens, Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, or Homo Floresiensis, and each attempts to develop instincts and higher cortical brain functioning, such as language traits. The populations expand and collide, and eventually consciousness, society, and culture are sought after.

The game supports up to five players; we had four. In the early game you need to spread out because the land can't support too many people in close proximity (until you develop your abilities). The terrain can also change on you because of global calamities -- land bridges can disappear, tundra can become impassable ice, forests can become impassable jungles, savannah can become desert that'll kill you, etc. In theory the reverse is also true, but we saw four or five things go wrong and only one reversal. The result of this was that one player became trapped for a good long time and that was no fun at all for him.

The mechanics of the game were mostly fine (I'll clarify "mostly" in a bit). On your turn you get a number of actions corresponding to your current "innovation" level; the game forces this number down and you have to work to raise it. There are some built-in actions that are always available; most have prerequisites like having unlocked certain portions of your brain. The most common action seems to be to draw cards, which provide ways to unlock portions of your brain, among other things. It took me a little while to wrap my head around all the actions, but I got it eventually; in a second game I wouldn't stumble as much.

About that "mostly": the other key stat is your current population. In order to expand you need to put people onto the board; when they come back they go onto your innovation track (lowering the number), so you need to take actions to move markers from innovation to the population track (your pool of available-for-the-map people). Here's the hitch: if your population pool gets too small you risk having your fledgling society fall into chaos, but it's very easy to have your pool become too small. The effects of chaos are pretty severe, including losing half your board position -- and all those people go onto the innovation track, not the people track, so after that you may only have one action and you'll have to roll for chaos again. Iterate. It seemed too easy to get stuck this way. I think "too easy to get stuck" is a common characteristic of all three of this designer's games.

The game was interesting when the chaos thing wasn't doing too much damage and when no players were stuck in bad board positions. We'll have to play more to determine whether we were seeing the usual amount of this. I'd like to play again; jury is still out.

Bios: Megafauna is a new game with many things in common with American Megafauna. I don't know if that's marketing, a desire to also keep the older game "in play", or what. The BGG blurb:

In Bios: Megafauna, a reworking of Phil Eklund's own American Megafauna, players start as proto-dinosaurs or proto-mammals, starting in the post-holocaust world of the Permian catastrophe. Animals are tracked by dentition, size, aggressiveness, swiftness, browsing, grazing, burrowing, swimming, behavior, and insect-eating. Plants and animals that have gone extinct are collected in an area on the map called the tarpits. These tiles are distributed among the most populous players as victory points during four scoring rounds. Players cope with intense competition and environmental changes by starting new species and mutating them. Create bizarre chimeras, from vegetarian velociraptors to flying dolphins. Establish subterranean civilizations, tame fire, or just be super-sexy.

We played a two-player game with mixed results. Like American Megafauna, you're trying to specialize your species -- but not too much -- and spin off new species from them. The mechanic of how you acquire traits is completely different; instead of bidding as traits come out one per round, there are always five cards available for purchase, with the oldest card being free and the others progressively more expensive. (You pay to skip cards by putting one token on each card you skip; somebody who later takes the card gets the tokens. You start with only a few, so they stay in circulation.) There are now two ways to spin off a new species, from the board (kind of like the old game) and by buying a card for a similar-enough species. A card will have, say, four traits; you have to be able to match two of them. So this game actually has a way for you to get completely new traits for your derivative species, which is a nice change.

I'm skipping a lot of mechanics here. A full report will have to wait until we've played more.

This game, like American Megafauna and Origins, had ample opportunities to bog down. There were several times when I just couldn't do anything useful and my best move was to take the free card and flush it in hopes that the next card would be better. Playtesters apparently also ran into this and there's a suggested optional rule for increasing the card pool; we didn't play with that this time.

We were never able to figure out how the big extinction-causing disasters get triggered. I'm not sure if we were playing the disasters right, but we were following the instructions on the cards. The rules for all of these games are poorly organized, by the way.

One issue I had with American Megafauna is with the physical aspects of the game: too many hard-to-see, important markers. Bios: Megafauna makes this better and worse. The player pieces are wooden tokens of four different shapes instead of the cardboard tents (good), but some of the shapes are a little too similar to each other to see across the table (bad). The little cardboard chits to mark your mutations have been replaced with cards and tracks (good), but now not all the information is in one place (bad). The biome (terrain) tiles are half the size they used to be with small print (bad -- there's no "good" part on this). The scoring system is more satisfying (good).

We'll need to play this more to evaluate it. I'm concerned that it might not be possible to play on a dining-room table such that all players can see what's going on. The board and its biome markers should be much bigger than they are. But there's enough stuff per player that four people can't play on a card table either. Maybe with side tables.