North Star Games Oceans Board Game

Product Information

Each species is defined by its population and its traits. Through the game species will gain and lose traits, and gain and lose population depending on what it can eat, and what can eat it. Despite your best efforts, some species will go extinct! A species may have multiple copies of the same trait (trait effects are cumulative), but the maximum number of traits on any species is 3 unless a card explicitly allows for more. Synergising and synchronising different traits and using Deep cards in new and effective ways is thinky and fun. The salty strategies we adopt are going to be different every time we hit the water!

If the Cambrian Explosion has not yet started, remove 1 population from each of your species and place it behind your player screen in your score pile. If the Cambrian Explosion has started, place 2 population from each of your species into your score pile. Score all of your population if you Trait cards override the core rules and the Scenario cards, but they only apply to the species on which they are played. Most traits have an understood “This species” at the start of the card textbox. PLAYING THE GAME: Yet ‘Evolution’ was dropped from the original title, in part because Oceans nudges the series further towards speculative fiction. (The upcoming Legends of the Deep expansion pushes this even further with, among other things, a tribe of flying whales – read the Meeple Mountain review here.)This cycle of feeding and ageing is at the core of the game’s puzzle. Feed too much and you’ll overpopulate, losing momentum. Feed too little and your species will go extinct, forever wiped from the evolutionary map. As you can only feed with one of your species each turn, but must age all of them, figuring out how to keep all your species alive can be a real brain burner. It's been many years since I read the Hyperion/Endymion books, so time for a re-read this winter. Simmons was doing a science-fiction Canterbury Tales, but brought lots of bold ideas to the table. I... However, Oceans deviates from its forebears in some interesting ways, creating an experience that’s far more open, exploratory and dynamic.

And it’s such an accommodating, elegant game. Take the fish tokens. They start off as food, become population once eaten, convert to points when siphoned off by ageing, and then can be spent to pay for Deep cards. A single token transforms from provisions to population to points to pounds and players barely blink an eye. It’s one of the smoothest pieces of board game design I’ve ever seen. (The fish are also coloured by player count and “roughly divided” during set-up. I wish all games were this player-friendly.) I am a mountain, I am the sea Oceans offers us a game of great depth. It is not the simplest game to teach and, appropriate for a game of this theme the direct aggression between players gives the game a lot of bite which many players might find too confrontational.A simple hand of cards is all the godly power you need to breathe life into the aquatic species you will create. Each beautifully illustrated card is a single trait that you can imbue your creation with: Filter Feeder, Apex Predator, Transparent etc. Each trait twists the rules, allowing you to create a unique ocean dweller. The Cambrian Explosion starts when the 1st Ocean zone becomes empty, and continues until the end of the game. Remove the Cambrian Explosion card from the 1st Ocean zone as a reminder that it will never be deactivated. If the Cambrian Explosion begins during a player’s playing cards phase, they may immediately play a second card (Surface or Deep). If it begins afterwards, they may not return to their playing cards phase to play a second card.

Many species will be predators, each bigger than the next, all the way up to the dreaded apex predator. But some will eat in other ways, for example by scavenging on the sea bottom or filter-feeding on plankton. Below are examples of trait art – each a watercolour painting by famed nature artist Catherine Hamilton. If the revised feeding rules add flexibility, the additions of ageing and overpopulation provide bite. In the four years since Warcry released, Games Workshop has teased us with about two new Chaos Dwarf models and (unsurprisingly) has yet to produce full rules for Dawi-Zharr warbands. I have finally...I’ve enjoyed many games of Evolution: Climate and Evolution: New World. These are great games that nail their theme and gameplay. They’re engaging, challenging and entertaining. Finally, you age every species you have by transferring one fish token from each of your species into your score pile. In Oceans, fish is ultimately your scoring fodder. If your species have evolved and survived long enough to eat fish, they “age” on your turn. This means you can move a fish they have each been feeding on into your score pile. But if they can’t grow older, they go extinct! Every species in Oceans lives in the same environment: the left-most species of each player is adjacent to the right-most species of the next player. Many traits trigger based on the feeding of an adjacent species. The arrow icon at the bottom of a trait refers to the species immediately adjacent to that side