Evolution: The Origin of Species Card Game Review

Rating: 4.0/5.0

Evolve and nurture your creatures as they compete against other species in the exciting card game Evolution: The Origin of Species! Make your creatures stronger by giving them powerful traits. Use carnivores to attack the competition and protect your own creatures from the same. Maintain control and prove your superiority by becoming the most dominant species!

Evolution: The Origin of Species is published by RightGames, a Russian company known for other card games such as Potion-Making: Practice and The Enigma of Leonardo. The game is designed by Dmitry Knorre, a PhD in Biology, and stays true to the basic concepts of evolution. It doesn’t get bogged down in too much science though, and manages to deliver an exciting and fast-paced competitive game.

The game mimics the way competing species fight over food and each other to become the dominant species. This is played out entirely via a deck of cards and food tokens. The goal of the game is to make sure your creatures receive enough food each age (via the food supply or by eating other creatures), and the winner is the player with the most numerous and evolved species when the deck runs out.

The game is separated into multiple rounds of 4 phases each. The first phase is the Deployment phase, where players take turns to play and upgrade their creatures using cards. You can place any card face down as a new creature (the back of each card is a cute lizard representing a new species), or you can use the trait or ability on the card to upgrade your existing creatures.

The traits are the main part of the game and provide very interesting gameplay. There is the Carnivorous trait that allows the creature to eat (!) another creature. There is a Camouflage trait that allows a creature to avoid carnivores, but there is also a matching Sharp Vision trait that allows carnivores to see Camouflaged prey. There are also cooperative traits played on 2 creatures such as Symbiosis or Communication. These traits either protect the creatures or help them gather food faster. There are many other traits, each of which can evolve your creatures to become either specialized killers or hardy grazers.

The second phase is the Food Determination phase, where the amount of available food for the round is determined by a roll of the dice. A low roll will mean a period of famine where lots of creatures are going to die, while a high roll will mean those creatures prepared with Fat Tissue (a storage trait) can take advantage of the abundance of food and stock up.

The third phase is the Feeding phase, and players take turns performing actions. This usually involves choosing a creature to take food from the available supply. Certain traits will alter this, such as the Grazing trait that lets you destroy food from the supply, or the Communication trait that lets two creatures grab food at the same time. And there is the Carnivorous trait that lets you eat another creature. Your creature will receive food, and the victim (and all their traits) will have to be discarded. This phase continues until every creature has eaten all they can and/or used their Carnivorous trait.

Then comes the Extinction phase, where creatures who have not received food will die off. A creature is considered fed if they managed to get one food token in the Feeding phase. However, there are some traits that increase the amount of food they need. An example is the offensive Parasite trait that you can play on opponents’ creatures, making them require 2 extra food tokens. Once the unfed creatures are killed off, new cards are drawn and a new round begins where you can play new creatures or upgrade your existing ones. This continues until the deck runs out, and the winner is the player who has the most surviving creatures and traits on the board after the last Extinction phase.

The cards and tokens aren’t the best quality, and the art is pretty basic and generic. However, the game mechanics are very good, providing exciting and reasonably complex play for a game that lasts just over half an hour. There are many ways you can play the game. Do you evolve creatures that are well-protected and efficient food-gatherers? Do you focus on carnivores to eat up the competition? Or do you create a whole colony of swimmers that basically ignore all other species? Do you invest many traits on just one creature, risking everything on it? Or do you spread your cards out over many creatures, potentially getting into trouble during times of famine?

Control of the game swings very wildly as players gang up on the most dominant species. There will be rounds where an unobservant player may lose all their creatures and have to start from scratch. However, this is just a temporary setback and they can quickly rebuild their colony while the other players are killing each other’s creatures. This is a fast-paced and exciting game, and is a great filler game for players of all experience levels.

You can find out more about the game at RightGames’ website.

Complexity: 2.5/5.0

Playing Time: 30 to 45 minutes

Number of Players: 2 to 4 players

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