Number of (physical) plays: 6 Designers: Dominic Crapuchettes, Dmitry Knorre, and Sergey Machin Artists: JJ Ariosa, Giorgio De Michele, Catherine Hamilton, and Kurt Miller Release Year: 2014 Mechanics: Hand Management, Direct Conflict, Secret Unit Deployment Publisher: North Star Games
Introduction
When I’m not playing board games at a table, I’m often playing digital implementations of board games. And because I crave discoverability and am always trying new games, my ‘Games’ folder on my phone has slowly grown out of control.
In 2019 North Star Games released the Evolution Board Game app for Android and iOS, bringing their hit 2014 title designed by Dominic Crapuchettes, Dmitry Knorre, and Sergey Machin into the digital age. The app launched ‘free’ and allowed players to sample the core game. With a robust tutorial, 10 missions of the campaign, and one online multiplayer game per day, it was much more generous than many other apps that demand money upfront, or offer a severely stripped down demo.
I installed Evolution as soon as it became available and played through the free campaign. I had enjoyed the physical game previously, even if it had a tendency for players to pick on the player who falls behind.
North Star Games hasn’t let this app become stagnant. Over the past two years, it’s received a multitude of updates, including Single Player Weekly Challenges, Monthly Tournaments, a Pass and Play mode, various new traits, Asynchronous play, and a ton of bug fixes. In addition to all these new features that have been added, one of my favourite aspects of Evolution is cross-platform play. I love apps that let me play with my friends, no matter their chosen device.
The full game (which includes the rest of the campaign and unlimited online matches) in unlocked via a single In-app purchase. This means if you generally share your purchased apps with members of your family via Google’s Family Library feature, each member will need to pay for the full game individually.
How to Play
I’m writing this section from the perspective of playing the game at the table.
Evolution’s gameplay revolves entirely around cards. At the beginning of each round players draw trait cards into their hand (3, plus 1 more for every species they control). Each player must discard one card (face down) to seed food into the central feeding pool, then in player order, may play a trait card (face down) to any of their species to give them a competitive advantage in the ecosystem, or discard a card to grow their species’ population or body size. Players can also discard a card to create a whole new species. Each animal can only have 3 unique traits at a time, but traits can be replaced; they aren’t necessarily permanent.
The first rounds usually have plenty of food for everyone
After everyone has had a chance to play cards to grow and evolve their species, the face down food cards are revealed and players have to start living with the consequences of their decisions. All the trait cards are flipped face up (and are now active), and beginning with the starting player, may feed one of their species. Herbivores take food from the shared central pool while any animals with the Carnivore trait eat other species around the table (Carnivores must have a larger body size than their prey).
Once all animals have fed as much as they can, the collected food is deposited into a bag (to be revealed at the end of the game) and a new round begins. If any species collected less food than their population, their population is reduced (and could go extinct if no food was gathered).
If the deck runs out of cards during the the deal cards phase, the end of the game is triggered. Players finish the round as normal, then score one point for every food in their bag and one point for every trait and population on your species that managed to survive until the bitter end.
Review
Playing Evolution with your friends can be dangerous. While the first round or two is a utopia, with plenty of food to go around, and a gaggle of herbivores happily growing their populations and evolving traits that allow them to harvest food more quickly than the others. The tenor of gameplay changes the second you see someone build up their body size and play a face down trait. Suddenly you find yourself double-guessing your friends. “Did they just develop a taste for flesh? Do I play the Long Neck trait or the Hard Shell trait? One will defend me, while the other gives me more food…”
Only after all players have had a chance to grow their population and body sizes are the traits revealed. This is such an exciting moment of the game where everyone’s strategies are laid bare. Taking the risk to gather more food (which is points at the end of the game) while eschewing defenses can be lucrative. At the same time, seeing a poorly defended animal gives incentive to other players to grow fangs and take a pound of flesh for themselves.
Evolution is rife with player interaction, and it manifests dramatically as soon as someone turns into a Carnivore. Suddenly everything feels scary and you scramble to build a defense. Warning Calls, Burrowing, and Climbing are all useful ways to ensure your precious creatures don’t become someone else’s snack.
Personally, I enjoy Evolution, but it almost always leaves me feeling just a bit sour, due to the fact that sometimes the best option is to kill someone else at the table, or, someone else has evaded my defenses and drove me into extinction. I’ve said before that I’m a conflict adverse player so it should be no surprise that playing a game with carnivores and tearing into my friends doesn’t exactly illicit joy in my heart. However, playing against AI opponents is an entirely different; there are no hard feelings when playing a cold, heartless robot.
The easy AI is real easy
Playing the Evolution app is a perfect way to enjoy this game design. The animations are fast and snappy, the AI ‘thinks’ quickly, and holding each of the cards brings them up on the screen for easy reading. The End Turn button even requires that you hold it for a few seconds to resolve the dreaded “mis-click”, which is a stroke of UX genius.
The first 10 missions (which are available for free) of the campaign ease you into playing. They keep some of the advanced traits out of the first few games, and even present you with situations to teach you some unconventional strategies (such as using the Intelligence trait to attack a species, which reduces its population, making its Defensive Herding trait useless, allowing you to attack it a second time).
Because the animations are fast, and the AI doesn’t slow the game down, it’s so easy to blaze through game after game of Evolution. I’m much more willing to explore different strategies when the time commitment is reduced down to mere minutes.
Between pass & play, cross play between devices, AI solo games with various AI levels, campaign, and weekly challenges, I have to admit that the Evolution app has everything that I look for in a digital board game adaption, AND the game itself is excellent! Take care that you don’t play the app too much, lest you become an Evolution master and crush your friends the next time you play the game in-person.
Welcome to part two in my Top 100 games series, going through the next 10 games in my list! I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes time to pick a game, the games listed here aren’t necessarily at the forefront of my mind (almost as if there were at least 80 other games ahead of them), but I can tell you that if any of these games get suggested, I am down to play and know that I’ll have a great time doing so.
90 – Colt Express
Colt Express designed by Christophe Raimbault is a hand management, action programming game about being the best thief amongst a colourful cast of scoundrels. In Colt Express everyone plays cards one at a time that represent the actions they will perform and the order they will be performed. Each round is dictated by a round-card that tells all players how many actions can be queued up, and whether those actions are public or secret. If the actions are public, the card is placed face-up, while secret actions are denoted by face-down cards.
Your goal is to accrue the most wealth by scooping it up from the floor, shooting your opponents, and swinging fists in hopes to make people drop their hastily gathered loot. Other actions include shooting at your opponents (or getting shot by stray bullets), leaping up and down the train cars, and controlling the Marshall, who also shoots at anyone who gets too close.
What makes Colt Express fun is the chaos that ensues from needing to pre-plan and program all of your moves for the round, then having something unexpected throw all of your hopes and desires out the damn window. The whole table hoots with laughter they watch characters bumble about the train. You will hold your head in your hands with disbelief as your character moves unexpectedly to an empty train car, then punches the air, tries to pick up loot that isn’t there, and finally shoots their gun at nothing.
Broom Service by Andreas Pelikan and Alexander Pfister is a pick up and deliver game about witches delivering potions. In Broom Service, everyone has a handful of cards that dictate the actions that are available to them. Each card has a stronger “Brave” action and a weaker “Cowardly” action. The actions on a card are usually very similar, but the brave action is much stronger.
So why would anyone ever choose the cowardly action? Excellent question reader! At the beginning of a round, each player picks 4 of their 10 cards and that forms their ‘hand’. The first player will play one of their action cards and choose to play either the “Brave” or “Cowardly” action. Then, every other player in turn order will either pass, or play the same action card from their hand and also choose to play the “Brave” or “Cowardly” action. Anyone who chooses the cowardly action can simply perform that weaker action. Any players who chose to be brave need to wait until everyone has had a chance to play or pass. If any subsequent players choose to be brave, then all previous brave players don’t get to do anything for this action!
The tension of desiring to do the brave action, but fearing the following players snatching it away from you is genius. I love the theme of witches trying to deliver their potions around the world, and the art evokes memories of classic fairytale story books.
88 – Seasons
I’ve often tried to sell Seasons to my friends as a light version of Magic: The Gathering. In Seasons you play as sorcerers competing in the legendary tournament of 12 seasons with the winner being crowned archmage of the kingdom of Xidit. The game begins with a draft phase, where you swap hands with your opponent picking a card to keep and passing the rest until you have 9 cards in your hand. You then must separate those 9 cards into 3 stacks of 3. You’ll draw these cards into your hand at the start of each year.
On every turn, the die that correspond with the current season are rolled and each player gets to take one into their play area, gaining the benefits shown on the face. The remaining die progresses the time track forward, perhaps hurtling you into a new season.
I’ll be upfront; while I’ve played this game 16 times, every single play has been on Board Game Arena. The system takes care of all the bookkeeping like tracking your energy intake, your tableau limits, and your crystal counts. I could see how playing this game on the table would be a little onerous, but damn is this game worth playing, and worth playing repeatedly. The art is cute and charming, and players are constantly forced to make decisions on how best to play their cards. Each season has their own set of dice that dictate the types and amount of resources that will be available to players. for example, If the game is currently in the summer season, water energy may be in short supply, but fire will be plentiful. Of course, there are ways to mitigate the luck and restrictions, but they are not without their own penalties.
Seasons is best played with 2 players, and only gets better and better as you and your opponent reply it, learning how best to manipulate the system to amass the most crystals, and claim your crown as Archduke.
87 – Underwater Cities
Underwater Cities by Vladimir Suchy takes players into the depths of the ocean and tasks them with creating the best underwater metropolis possible. Kind of. The theme here has a tendency to melt away as your brain spins, trying to maximize your actions to maximize your productions and end game victory points.
UnderwaterCities utilizes a unique worker placement system that uses cards from the players hands. On your turn you can take any of the open colour-coded actions along the edge of the game board. At the same time you play a card from your hand. If the colour of the action and the card match, you can do both actions. If they don’t, you only get to do the action on the board.
This game is an exercise in loss aversion. I’ve found myself delaying taking a critical action simply because I didn’t have a properly coloured card to play along side it and refused to do something that felt inefficient. Underwater Cities also has an excellent arc to its gameplay, with the first few rounds making players feel starved for resources, then growing their engines until suddenly you find yourself placing several costly building on a single turn.
I recall when this game was released a few people compared it to extremely highly rated (by other people) Terraforming Mars. Personally, I don’t see the comparison, Underwater Cities is much more complex (and the better game in my opinion), but the games play significantly differently and don’t evoke the same feelings in players.
Underwater Cities is available to play on Yucata.de
86 – Calico
Calico by Kevin Russ is a tile placement game about matching patterns and colours to satisfy the whims and desires of cats. Each player takes turns placing a tile from their hand, then pulling one from an offer. Each player has their own board with 3 objectives that can be satisfied by patterns, colours, or both. You also get additional points if you can connect three tiles of the same colour you also get a button that’s worth points. Everyone knows kittens love quilts with buttons
Don’t be fooled by Calico’s adorable aesthetic. The actual game contains an intense cerebral workout. You only have two tiles in your hand and 3 in the supply that you can take from to refill your hand after you place one tile. Within these limitations, you’re tasked with trying to place tiles that contain 6 different patterns and 6 different colours in ways that connect like patterns and colours, while also satisfying the objectives on the board which require multiple different sets of colours and patterns. It does not take long before everyone at the table has their head in their hands and the only thing keeping the table from being flipped is the adorable kitten artwork dotting this game.
85 – Automobiles
Automobiles by David Short is one of my favourite racing games (being so far down the list is pretty telling on how I feel about racing games in general (But if you break it down, aren’t all games a race in the end? (No, shut up))).
I’ve written in depth about Automobiles before, so I won’t rehash words I’ve already written. For those who don’t know, Automobiles begins with two trays of cubes. One tray hold white, black, and various shades of grey cubes, representing the various gears of your car, which correspond to spots on the game board. The coloured cubes have special abilities that are set at the beginning of the game when you draw a card for each colour (the game has 4 cards of each colour, offering a wide variety of powers to choose from). From those trays of cubes each player seeds their own bag with a standard set of white and grey cubes, and a chosen selection of coloured cubes. Then they’re off to the races!
There aren’t a lot of bag building games, and theoretically, this could also work as a deck builder; the bag and cubes don’t do anything that cards couldn’t do also. Having the bag of cubes click and clatter as your swish your knuckles around, searching for a cube is satisfying. When you and your opponents are pulling around the final turn and you desperately need a specific cube THAT YOU KNOW YOU HAVE IN THE BAG SOMEWHERE really gets your heart pounding in your chest.
Also, it’s fun to make the vroom noises with your mouth as you move your little car around the track. Automobiles is available to play on Board Game Arena and Yucata.
84 – When I Dream
I love when a party game makes me question if my friends are insane or not. When I Dream by Chris Darsaklis has one player close their eyes and everyone else offer one word clues to try and lead them toward a word as dictated by a card. The guesser gets one guess, then the word card gets moved to either the correct or incorrect pile, then the game presses on with a new word card drawn.
After a couple of minutes the guesser is then asked to recount their dream, trying to name all the elements they can remember. If they’re able to name all the words that were in the ‘correct’ pile, they get a bonus two points.
What makes this game excellent is each of the players also have a role. Some are encouraged to try to get as many words correct as possible, while others are trying to lead the guesser astray. Others yet are trying to achieve a balance between the correct and incorrect cards. The inclusion of asking the guesser to recount their dream is a fun exercise that looks easy until you find yourself in the hot seat and the only word you can remember for the life of you is “spaghetti”.
83 – Evolution
Evolution, designed by Dominic Crapuchettes, Dmitry Knorre and Sergey Machin, is a hand management game about survival of the fittest. In Evolution you are tasked with growing creatures’ populations and body sizes, and assigning traits that will help them not only survive, but thrive.
The gameplay loop begins with a bunch of small herbivores, happily eating from a well stocked feeding hole. As a turn or two passes, the herbivores grow larger and get more efficient at eating. Eventually one creature gets a taste for blood and turns into a carnivore, feasting upon its neighbours. Very quickly defenses are raised; some animals learn to climb, other have defensive herding, and other develop a hard shell.
Evolution Is a brilliant game that has each player double guessing what their neighbours will do. With every creature you control having access to different traits, and some traits working off neighbouring creatures, you can have fun building an impenetrable wall, or you can have fun trying to tear down the other players’ walls. Only the fittest will survive.
82 – Everdell
Everdell is so hot right now. Released in 2018 and with 3 successful Kickstarters funding a myriad of expansions, Everdell has climbed the Boardgamegeek ranking and at the time of writing this, sits as the 31st best board game of all time.
Everdell is a light worker placement tableau building game set in a fantasy forest. As you play your workers and bring cards into your tableau, you’ll slowly start to see an engine form. It’s easy to play, has absolutely gorgeous artwork, and a family friendly andromorphic animal theme. It’s easy enough to play with your family, while maintaining enough complexity to keep adults involved. I don’t really want to use the term “gateway game”, but this gorgeous game is a perfect ambassador to show people how beautiful and interesting board games can be.
I’ve enjoyed my plays of this game a lot, and if the opportunity to play it more arose, I have no doubts that Everdell could climb higher in my rankings. As of this moment, it has settled at #82.
81 – Century: Spice Road
It seems for every game that has new and interesting mechanics, another one is just about trading cubes for other cubes to trade into points. Century: Spice Road is in the latter, but does so in a fast and satisfying way. In Century: Spice Road you take action cards into your hand, then play the cards to manipulate your cubes. Some cards will simply gain you more cubes, others will let you trade in specific recipes, while other others will allow you to upgrade some cubes higher along the value chain. The other action you can take is to sell a specific combination of spice cubes to acquire a point card, which are necessary to win the game.
Century: Spice Road does restrict players to only being able to hold 10 cubes at a time, so you feel an ebb and flow of resources as you build your wealth, then drain your coffers to nab a particularly high scoring card. The game often begins with people taking card after card from the row, but soon enough each player should have a small engine they can exploit to increase the number and value of their spice cubes until, finally, one person is labeled “The Spiciest Trader”
The Century series of games have the added benefit of being able to be combined with the other games in the series to enhance each other. I’ve played each of the games in the Century series, and while each one stands on it’s own as a good game, I firmly believe that Century: Spice Road stands taller than the rest.
