Cultivating an undersea ecosystem
🗾Atoll is a medium-light competitive engine-building game for 2-4 players, in which everyone gradually builds up their own seascape filled with corals 🪸, fish 🐟 and all kinds of sea creatures 🦀.
To have a well-scoring ecosystem you want to acquire as many creature cards for your tableau as possible. To be able to do so you need coral cards though, as every creature has an adjacency requirement of coral colonies. Your tableau will be thus made up of corals and creatures in a checkerboard pattern! 🙂
Corals also have various abilities 👉 either special actions, or immediate, passive or scoring effects. Picking the right corals to match your plans is crucial! ☝️ Also importantly, when you add a creature to your tableau you are not done yet. You can (and should) increase its abundance (point value) by feeding it, also gaining some ever important resources.
Feeding works differently depending on the animal: 🧐 smaller creatures might just need to be exhausted for the round, or fed a plankton token. Larger fish will prey on smaller fish (by reducing its abundance) - you can actually hunt in an opponent’s tableau once per round, but they don’t lose anything. 🤝 So you mostly have to watch out not to make your own fish species extinct by eating them all up. There are other nuances like certain animals having a symbiotic relationship so they grow together. As animals are fed they get a fatigue token, basically disabling them for the round, but there are ways to remove those.
The structure of the game itself is quite simple: 🙃 you play over 4 rounds, spending your resources to do actions in the Action phase (mostly acquiring new cards for your tableau), which is then followed by a Recovery phase with income and cleanup steps to prepare for the next round. There are event cards too if you choose to include them, that affect all the players.
All in all, an interesting medium-light game with some potential to do combos, and a pretty nice table presence. 😉 I just wish they would have used bigger fonts, as texts are hard to read from a distance!
