I've got some vague ideas for an evolution based game but am having some trouble getting creative traction. I wanted to call it Intelligent Design because the player would be directing and involved in evolutionary process. I originally tried using a species pyramid but have since scrapped the idea and decided to try using one species.
Each player has a species card with five abilities that start at one. Mobility, Vision, Reproduction, Defense and Digestion. Players would then draw adaptation cards and play them on their species to alter these stats and give them some special abilities. In order to play adaptation cards the player must discard cards from their hand, see Race to the Galaxy. Then each player would contest with other players by comparing their stats and however has the highest gains gene points equal to their score in that stat. Players then could use those gene points could upgrade the level of their species. The goal is to get to level five, human level intelligence basically.
Some of the problems are that it just isn't a lot of interesting descisions to make, there's no real representation of natural selection and there might be a runaway winner problem.
Some of the adaptation cards would be a strait stat increase, others would increase one stat and lower another, some would increase more than one stat and some would increase a stat temporarily. Some adaptations could only be played on a species of a certain level or higher.
Evolution game: Intelligent Design
An interesting idea. I used to enjoy writing genetic and ecological simulations, so this immediately appeals to me.
May I first suggest taking a good look at your attributes and justifying each one by linking it to a game mechanic?
What immediately springs to mind to further this idea is using a deck of environment cards, dealing 3 or so for a round, and then allowing each creature to be placed in a chosen environment, taking advantage of benefits, and battling any other creature/s it encounters there.
For instance, a jungle might require vision to navigate, provide a benefit of vegetation as nourishment, and have an added drawback of reducing mobility.
So that this environment would be ideally suited to a herbivore with high mobility and sight.
Nourishment could then be used as a currency in the game, used to draw adaptations.
Reproduction doesn't stand out as something which has an obvious application, unless you allow player's to produce additional copies of their creatures.
This could work, of course. A higher population requires more food, but also allows you to gather more, and survive attacks better. Maybe represent creatures by giving players simple coloured tokens which they earn by spending food (each token is an exact replica of the player's base card with its adaptations, and costs, say, X per creature they already control, for balance), and which may be distributed to the environments.
Am I on the right track?
I think environment cards/tiles are necessary too...
Some environmental catastrophes or events that could influence the evolution of the creatures towards one direction or another could be cool too : droughts, ice age...
Environments : Stage 1 Primordial soup, deep sea vents, Stage 2 Deeps, Middle Ocean, Shallows, Stage 3 Ocean, Swamp, Forest, Grassland, 4 Forest, Swamp, Grassland, Desert, Jungle, 5 End of game
Mass Extinction at the end of each stage
Is the Mass Extinction affecting all the species regardless of the way they evolved ? ( I mean the characteristics, not the total population )
I was hoping mass extinctions would be partially mitigated by certain adaptations, for example a major ice age would be mitigated by certain adaptations for keeping warm, or maybe there might just be a general durability stat that you can increase with adaptations for a cost.
That's precisely what I had in mind... A single "Durability" stat may probably be enough, but I think I prefer the first option... it really offers a lot of perspectives ( maybe too much ? ^^ )
You may want to look into the game Evolution Earth: cataclysm. Its sold on thegamecrafter.com and has an entry on boardgame geek.
Also have a look at spore (PC and xbox?), which covers the evolution and development stages, and extinction to a lesser degree. Although it is a different medium, the topics it covers are very close to what you're going for.
I'd have thought an extinction level event would simply create such harsh conditions that any ill-adapted species would simply be wiped out.
If you are using a separate doomsday clock mechanic, you could give adaptations a separate set of attributes which relate to extinction level events, but I would hope for peaks in a dynamic system rather than tacking on an additional mechanic. Adding something like a climate mechanic would give you added depth (as a range of continuous environment modifiers), and would occasionally combine with environments to create conditions in which a species simply would not be able to keep up. So that if a cold snap causes all creatures to cost additional upkeep, a grazing herd which relies on numbers, low upkeep, and cheap reproduction would be able to outlast a low-nutrition turn by sacrificing a few members of the herd for the sake of the species, while a predator with high upkeep might not be able to hunt enough prey to survive. Still running with the predator-prey mechanic, why not give players three classes of life-form to raise - a plant, a herbivore, and a carnivore. They might have to balance the development of one species against the survival of another, and may even have to prey on their own creations in order to keep their charges from extinction. A plant doesn't have vision, but it can be prickly (defense), it needs nutrition (upkeep) and has means to gather nutrition (digestion), and reproduce. What it lacks is mobility, but that could be part of a rock/paper/scissors balance between the three classes of life - predators prey on herbivores, who prey on plants, who in turn subsist on decaying flesh (some kind of tally of all types of predation over a round, perhaps?). Again, players are balancing easy meat for their own species against easy prey for their opponent's.
The range of development is a problem though, because a microbe can't grow teeth. You could put each stage of development on a card and only apply the relevant one, or restrict yourself to a relatively limited range.
Maybe mobility works like initiative, in that it places the creature higher up the movement order. Predators have a lot, but they have to try and predict where their prey will graze, just as herbivores have to predict the distribution of plants, and plants have to predict the outcome of combat between carnivores and herbivores (presumably carnivores will eat meat, while herbivores will leave it to decompose and thereby feed the plants).
Aquatic creatures could be of any class, and simply require a certain level of moisture, which is provided by environments and multiplied by climate.
I'll give you a shout if any more ideas pop up. To be honest, its a game I'd love to make myself. Are you aiming for this to be print-and-play-able?
I just saw I missed your time-line breakdown, so I guess a lot of what I posted there will be irrelevant.
It might still be food for thought, or maybe I'll get a chance to design a game along the same theme after all. I'm working on a couple of things at the moment, so there's plenty of time to see if there is more than one game in there.
Yes and Evolution Earth: Cataclysm is also available for free print´n play.
I have made two games about evolution which might interest the readers of this thread. They are Evolution Earth (boardgame) and Evolution Earth: Cataclysm which is a card game.
Evolution Earth:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/70533/evolution-earth
Evolution Earth: Cataclysm
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/63216/evolution-earth-cataclysm
Evolution Earth (boardgame) has a timeline from critters to mammals and it´s an area control game where you try to have species superiority in certain continents or ocean. Those continents are secretly and randomly chosen in the beginning of the game and player´s get victory points with that. Game also has some special cards that are based on the same principle (superiority) for example superiority with your species that live in the jungle continent or superiority of having most insects in the game etc.
Evolution Earth also has a competition between species and this is measured by their color. If an area has say 4 red species it´s very powerful against opponents species that has only a little of red colour in that same area (continent). The colour "code" also shows how adapted they are into their environment. The more there is the same colour the more they are adapted to a specific environment (for example tundra) (and are very strong competitors with that colour) but very weak against climate changes for example. Also the number of species in a specific area (continent/ocean) defines the survival chance and also the ability to compete against other players´ species.
Evolution Earth has a different set of cards that have cataclysms on them from viruses to changes in ocean´s currents to desertifications, supernova explosions, climate changes, ice ages, asteroid impacts and so on.
If you are interested the rulebooks of both games are available via those internet links.
Hope these helps you defining and creating your evolution game. There is a plenty of different views how to make an evolution game. The evolution Earth game was a design that took me many years to finish and it grew so big in many ways that I guess it´s almost impossible to get published. However now I feel like it has anything a decent evolution game should have: all periods or Era from precambrian to mammals and birds, moving continents and very dynamic competition and survival system.
More info on both games on BGG.
Thanks
I have played Spore actually for PC. In fact Spore is part of the reason I started thinking of making an evolutionary game, largely because I disliked Spore so much I immediately started thinking of ways you might do it better.
I want the mass extinctions to be sharp sudden events that seperate the different stages. I was thinking vaguely of a a climate mechanic, each environment card flipped up changes the climate a certain number up or down, all species must either match that number or lose one population for point of difference between them and the climate. So for example Species A is adapted to a climate of 3, then the climate changes up one to four. The player with Species A must change their climate rating or lose population.
As to predation, I was thinking of just having a predation stat. 0 predation is default, which means primary producer, 1 predation would be a herbivore, 2 predation or higher would be a predator and a species could use any other species of lower predation level as prey. This solves the different levels of evolution problem since all that matters is how high your stat is relatively not absoloutely, i.e. no need to grow sharp teeth on a microbe. Possibly also I'd include a defense stat, so in order for a predator to use your species as prey you must exceed both their predation and defense stats (taken seperately not together). The drawback of high predation is that the higher your predation the more you have to prey on, and if you don't prey on enough you starve, losing population equal to the difference between what you ate and what you need.
Another stat might be metabolism, it would determine how much a species needs to eat and how fast it reproduces. So for example metabolism one means you need one food per population and gain population equal to some fraction of your current population, maybe starting at one half. So high metabolism would let you produce faster when food was plentiful but have you shrink faster when food was scarce.
Which I suppose brings up the question of why you want high population. There needs to be some reward mechanism for high population and I was thinking of tying it to gene points somehow. Also I should mention that I'm moving away from the idea of adaptation cards and towards using gene points to adjust stats up or down. So for example you could spend two gene points to raise or lower metabolism by one. As to how you get gene points, I was thinking maybe whoever has the highest population in an environment would gain gene points or making it so each turn you could gain gene points or change a stat but not both.
Which brings up the further question of the goal of the game, I was thinking either score awarded at each mass extinction or whoever had the highest number of gene points at the end of the game. Or even more interesting, at each mass extinction players would place all of their gene points in a pool which could no longer be used but whoever had the largest pool at the last extinction would win the game. In which case I think I definately want to tie gene points to sucess in population terms.
I don't really want there to be an iniative order, I'm looking more for an all at once feel. So there would be a first player marker, passed to the left at the beginning of each round. There would be essentially three phases, pass the disc, spend gene points to adapt species and then competition. For competition three environments are flipped up, the first player starts by playing one population from each of his species on an environment, then play proceeds clockwise with all other players doing the same until all population has been played. Then an event card is flipped up, applying certain effects like climatic change. Then competition is resolved, population is removed or added as necessary and players gain a certain number of gene points equal to how well they did.
As to Aquatic vs. Land Dwelling, it's not an issue in stages one, two or four but could be an issue in stage three. The way I could deal with that is either get rid of Ocean in stage three or add a marker that could be bought with gene points to indicate a species as aquatic or land based. This would be interesting since any species from the last mass extincition would be aquatic by default and would need to change quickly to land based if they wanted to compete. I don't know whether I'd want a seperate catagory for amphibians or not.
You say it's a game you'd love to make yourself, so I invite you to collaborate with me or to make a game independently and compare later if you want. I think print and playable sounds like a good idea but I haven't done that before so I'm not sure how to go about it, any advice?
I think Evolution Earth and Evolution Earth: Cataclysm both look really interesting but I think they're too different from my game for me to be able to steal any useful mechanics. Thanks for the link though.
I enjoyed spore quite a lot, but I didn't use any online content, as it had a tendency to ruin everything. It was childishly colourful, and did a terrible job of what it purported to represent, but the creature-building connected with the strategic element to some degree, and it could be entertaining. The tribal stage lacked interaction with the environment, and the civilization stage was impossible to manage, but there was fun to be had at all stages.
A print-and-play (or PnP) game is simply a game which is published in a format which allows someone to print and assemble it at home. Typically a self-contained pdf download with half a dozen or so pages, and often no more than a couple of pages of rules, so that you can print and play it without much need for prior preparation. You write up the rules as usual, create your components, and bundle the whole thing using a pdf converter. Usually this is done on a non-profit basis, and I think a collaboration would be too awkward to split profits on anyway, but there are possibilities for earning small amounts with this method of publishing, including several sites offering to publish on demand and split the profit.
A PnP game will often not be taken very seriously, and will never receive the recognition of being placed on a retailer's shelf, but they can be very popular as they can be obtained at no cost, and are often easy to learn, quick to play, and highly portable.
If you want a free pdf converter, I can recommend scribus.
Collaboration sounds like a nightmare to accomplish, but might be a lot of fun too. I'm working on a couple of projects already - one of them is at a near standstill, but who knows, I might come across the right idea to knock some life back into it while working on this. This also seems like a more self-contained project than either of the others I have going.
Take a look, if you like, over on BGG. A completely different kind of game, and while feedback is always very welcome, I'd suggest keeping it over there so as not to derail this thread.
Re metabolism, how about it determines upkeep cost and reproduction rate directly? If your species has a metabolism of 1 and you haven't lost any of them this turn due to inability to pay upkeep (so they're all well-fed), you can produce one offspring. If it has 2, you can produce two offspring, but you've paid twice as much, mimicking how ruminants, who move (and think) slowly and take all day over chewing a mouthful of grass, have one calf in a year, while large cats, who can eat a cow in a matter of hours, may have two, three, or more cubs, and small mammals, who scurry around all day fuelled by a constant supply of grains and grubs, might have a dozen pups. You might want a wider scale than 0-2 for this though, as producing one offspring might not cover demand for prey. Realism could suffer a bit when you consider that a plant can have hundreds or thousands of offspring in a single year, but the lack of nutrition could be offset with a consumption mechanic along the lines of nutrition gained = prey's nutrition value - difference in metabolic rate between predator and prey. So that if a species with metabolism 5 (say, a dog) preys on a species with nutrition 5 and metabolism 1 (a cactus), it only gains 1 nutrition. Nutritional value would have to be derived (possibly the total of all points spent on adaptation), but combining metabolism with reproduction reduces the number of genes, which helps simplify gameplay.
I may be thinking in the wrong direction with that, but something along these lines may lead to species over-developing and out-competing itself, and result in a species-cycling mechanism, where players can abandon an overly costly species and start a new one from scratch, somewhat small world like. This is contrary to your original goal of developing your species into sentient beings, however.
In any case, it looks like genes are boiling down to :
- predation or voracity (offense)
- toughness or mobility (defense)
- metabolism (upkeep and reproduction)
- resilience or adaptation to environment
I'm not sure players adjusting their creatures willy-nilly is a realistic mechanic, as that's just not how it works in nature. All kinds of random mutations occur, but only the successful ones are reproduced, but that probably makes for some pretty frustrating gameplay.
You could combine adaptations and climate on the same card if you're concerned that components are becoming unwieldy.
The climate track sounds like it could work, but using cards to affect it seems a little over-engineered unless there's something interesting to go on the cards. I would probably be tempted to roll 1D6, and +1 on 5 or 6, -1 on 1 or 2. D4 would be ideal as climate would be more stable varying only on 1 and 4, but less commonly owned than D6.
I'll mock up a play area schematic later today, as and if I have time to work on it, just to get more of a visual discourse going so we can see how and if the idea is starting to take shape. While on the subject, what are your graphical skills like? And have you had any thoughts on visuals?
I thought the post I wrote on metabolism did say that it determined upkeep and reproduction directly but there's a good chance I wrote it in an unclear manner. Higher metabolism means higher food consumption and higher reproduction, how to implement this is a bit trickier. I think to determine upkeep or nutrition cost you multiply metobolism by population, if this number is higher than the available food then you lose population equal to the difference, if this number is smaller than the food avialability you gain population equal to either a percentage of your current population (prefferred but complicated) or just equal to your metabolism (less liked but simpler).
Here's the five stats I was looking at Predation, Durability, Climate Adaptation, Metabolism and Environment adaptation. Predation determines what you can eat, Durability is used during mass extinctions, for each point of durability one population point on the species survives, Climate Adaptation is a number related to the climate cards, if the climate is different than a species climate stat then that species loses population equal to the difference, metabolism determines upkeep cost and reproductive rate and environment adaptation would be some indicator to show that a species is better in certain environments and either gains more population or maybe more gene points.
About changing stats, I wanted it to be so you could spend gene points once per round to change a stat, so you can only change one thing at a time regardless of number of gene points. The gene points would be a reward for doing well when assigning species to environments (exactly how that reward system works I'm not sure yet) and are set aside at each mass extinction to determine end of game points.
I wanted to use climate cards because mixed with mass extinctions that would act as the game clock, also I've ditched the idea of getting to human sentience, it's just whoever has the most gene points set aside after the last mass extinction. For the mass extinctions I was thinking of rolling a d6 after to redetermine the climate. So the mass extinction would kill all population on each species minus durability and then the climate change might wipe out some of what's left. So if climate is three and a mass extinction is played, if I have Durability one then I lose the species on any roll that isn't three, so a one in six chance of survival, if durability is two then survival chance is one half and if durability is three then survival chance is two thirds. Obviously if the climate isn't at the average before the mass extinciton then that will change all of the odds. Since the penalty of climate change isn't huge I don't mind the climate being a little unstable so long as it doesn't vary wildly.
Also about the realism of the game, it's loosely based on evolution but I called it Intelligent Design because the players are in control of evolution, which makes it not real evolution. A very realistic evolution game would be terrible to play because the game would literally play itself, so I'm trying to avoid to much realism in the game while still trying to catch some of the basic concepts.
I think your suggestion on the nutrition gained through predation varying depending on the prey is good but I'm not sure how I want to go about it, I'll think about it and look at your suggestion.
As to my graphical skills, I have none. I am not in any way or form a visual artist and have never done anything graphical before other than a few mandatory school posters. What I was thinking of it looking like was having the population represented by coloured wooden discs that are easy to tell apart and move around, the species cards being regular card sized and the same with the event cards. The gene points could be little double helixes or something else like that. If you have some graphical experience I'd love any suggestions you have.
Sorry, for some reason I thought there was a question about metabolism affecting reproduction. There's a lot to read there, and some of it gets lost. In fact, I think there's a little too much. And you seem to be at a point where you could outline the game rules. I think it would be helpful. Just a rough outline of how the game works, because I'm lost.
I totally see your point on realism, and agree 100%.
A couple of things seem unclear ..
Is there a common deck of events (climate, environment, etc)?
If my creature is eaten by someone higher up on the food chain, do I lose it?
Do I have some way to protect it?
If I'm getting eaten, how does the environment affect nutrition?
If I'm lower down on the food chain, will I always be at the mercy of my opponent?
How do I get VP and how do I spend them?
What did you think about having multiple species on the go?
I've done some work with graphics etc, little of it print related, but I seem to get through. It looks like artwork would be limited to environment (event?) cards, which should be easy enough to do. I don't consider myself expert enough to create production-grade artwork, but I could certainly put together some prototyping materials which would last at least until v1.0, depending on demands.
I was going to do a game journal soon with the rules, the rules in this forum are confusing since they changed so much while I was writing various posts and because they're not clearly explained to begin with.
I won't be doing that right away because I just got back from Amsterdam and am running a little low on sleep.
Questions
1. There is one common event deck, one card is flipped over each turn and effects the game in some way and acts as the game clock. There is also an environment deck seperate from the event deck, three environments are flipped up each turn.
2. I want this to be how it works but I'm afraid it will lead to imbalance, I don't want players to be rewarded for driving species they depend on extinct regardless of who owns that species. I think any prey that are eaten will be lost.
3. You can buy defense points to protect your species, predation must be higher than defense in order to work, so if you have max defense you have no natural predators.
4. I a species is being eaten then I don't think there are any environmental factors on nutrition.
5. You can buy defense to boost yourself up on the foodchain, also you can to a certain extent try to play in environments away from your opponent's predators. However you need some species low on the food chain if you want to feed your own predators.
6. You get VP based on how many population points you have in an environment after all effects have been resolved. You may then spend the VP to alter species stats once per turn before placing species into environments. Also at every mass extinction you set aside all VP to store for the end of the game count, those VP are no longer usable for any other purpose.
7. I sort of assumed there would be multiple species, I know my first post says otherwise but as mentioned earlier the rules have changed dramatically since my first few posts. I don't know what range exactly I want the players to be in but I think anymore than five species per player with two players would be unwieldly and only two species each would be a bit sparse. The goal would be for most of the game to be played with 3 or 4 species in play with frequent extinctions to change up what you're playing with.
Thank you a bundle for working out some cards and for all your advice, I'll try to get some decent rules for you soon and realize my posts are often overly thick but that's part of how I think and unfortunately you'll have to put up with it until I get some good rules up.
Here's the first copy of the rules http://www.bgdf.com/node/4600, it's in game journals and is called Intelligent Design: A Game of Guided Evolution.
Hope the rules help clear up some of the confusion.
Thanks, I had been thinking of environment cards but hadn't been sure how to impliment them. I think the idea of choosing between multiple environments would be great though it would require me to scrap my one species only idea which is fine with me. I think this would be more interesting since stats then could be matched to different environments and there would be the choice of specialization vs. generilization. I also like the idea of using food to upgrade the population of a species, I think I'll keep gene points as well for adaptations and develop two seperate currencies for the game.
Another issue is predation, if there's multiple environments then I think it should be obvious that any predators must share an environment with prey. This could be interesting because a player with both a predator species and a prey species might try to match them up in the same environment, because even if it damages the prey the predator gets fed, though obviously it would be more advatageous to prey on your opponent. Another thing I might want to add to the environment is the idea of carrying capacity, i.e. that only a certain population can be supported in each environment and going over would cause a population crash.
Another thing I think might work would be making it so you could divide the population from a species over multiple environments, so let's say you have a herbivore that's best in grassland like areas. A grassland environment, a jungle environment and a coral reef are flipped up, you want to go in the grassland but you might hit the carrying capacity or meet competition from your opponent sufficent to force you into the jungle even though it's not as good.
Another interesting thing would be competetion between species, using the carrying capacity idea players may only put down one population marker at a time and so if they both take turns laying in the same area then there'll be competition between them to try to have the most markers in that area.
Another idea I wanted to impliment is mass extictions, something I obviously couldn't do with just one species but having multiple species will work great for. I was thinking that the environment deck would be divided up into sections based on the evolution of the life on Earth, starting in the microbial sea, upgrading to open ocean, getting to land, ect... If I use this system then each era could be ended by a mass extinction with each player having to remove a certain number of population tokens from each species or from the sum of their species, causing most species to go extinct with the rest entering the new era.
Thanks a lot for your advice, it was enourmously helpful.