Let's play evolution!

Evolution: New World 🦎 is a strategic card game in which you create species and provide them with a wide array of perks. Just like in real life, only the strongest, most cunning species can survive, and those that best adapt to their surroundings! 💪

The game utilizes one of my favorite mechanics: multi-use cards! 😍 Each round in the Development Phase you will play your hand of cards one at a time, either face-down, symbolizing a new species, or face-up, tucked under another card to add traits to that species. Cards have 2 traits on them and you can rotate them however you want! There are beautiful illustrations on the luxurious big cards, unfortunately you only see them in your hand, because otherwise they are either face-down or tucked. 😅 I do like how the traits are color-coded so you get all the important information at a glance!

After everyone has played all the cards they wanted, then you go to the Feeding Phase. It’s a fun tactical puzzle as you will go in turn order one at a time and draft food or shelter tokens from the Area cards, or attack other animals with your Predators. 🐅 You ideally want your best species to take shelter, and quickly take out other predators with your predators - and of course feed every one of your species or else they go extinct (aka. are discarded).

An unusual thing is how end-game scoring works: during the game you don’t collect any points, only your remaining species at the end are worth something.
So you might have the beefiest species for 5 Epochs, only to have it go extinct in the last one and get no points for it. 🙀

An aspect we don’t like is card draw. 😶 At end of the round you get as many cards as many species you have plus two. So whoever has the better board position gets rewarded for it. This means the stronger will get stronger and especially in our 2 player games this leads to a strong runaway leader problem. I do think you need a 3rd or 4th player to curb the power of the leader - so I wouldn’t recommend this at 2p. 🙁

I like the traits and there are a lot of them! Some involve rolling a 6-sided die, so you do get some randomness, but every trait feels very thematic! 😊