Lightweight game with fun decisions

In Emerge you slip into the shoes of scientists, as they find a formation of islands due to volcanic activity, and study the wildlife. To discover new islands and animals you will have dice at your disposal. 🎲 Each round you roll them, then decide how to spend them for your research - with clever implementations of dice manipulation! 😉

The elongated game board starts out pretty empty, players just have a small island each with a tree on them. A boat ⛵ meeple will travel forward each round to mark the progress of the game, and unlock additional dice for players. After 8 rounds you count up points! 🏆

Each round you will roll your dice and take turns as you spend dice to discover new islands or species (“discovering” actually means “placing”).
Depending on the value and amount of dice you pay, you can place down islands, trees, crabs, turtles, seals or birds. With islands you have a choice of either creating a new small island, or increasing the size of an existing one. This is important as bigger islands generally score more!

Placing meeples has fun limitations: crabs 🦀, turtles 🐢 and seals 🦭 can only go on an island if there is a tree on it, and they have to come in this order - so to place a turtle, you have to have a crab already. 🧐 Plus each island can only hold one of each type!
Birds 🐦 are different, as you can either attract them from the mainland or another island. They bring seeds with them so a new tree will grow as well! 🌳

What makes the game fun is how you can customize your player board each turn with modifiers. You could for example cover up your tree action with a crab modifier, so you are no longer able to discover trees, but double the chance for crabs! 😮 Plus these modifiers give you additional ways to modify already rolled dice!
You can also gather one-use research 🧫 tiles that give you helpful effects or discounts.

The aesthetics of the game must be mentioned: it looks amazing, both the colors and the meeples. The islands really come alive due to the 3D aspect. It’s just lovely. 🥰 Emerge is a lightweight game with fun decisions to use your dice and enough things to keep you hooked! 🙂