APEX: Carnivore

🎯 The Goal

Reduce your opponent’s life points (representing their population) from 20 down to 0 by adapting your species to out-hunt, out-defend, and out-evolve them.

⚙️ Core Actions

Each round, players manage a communal ecosystem and progress through five distinct survival phases:

• Draw & Bid for Initiative: Draw 5 cards from your ancestral deck and play them face-up into your play area. Count your traits with blue-hued borders to calculate your initiative total; the highest value claims the first player position.
• Perform Skill Checks: One by one, attempt to activate your played traits by rolling a white 20-sided die ($D20$). If your roll plus active card modifiers meets or exceeds the card’s Difficulty Class ($\hexagon$), the evolutionary trait successfully activates.
• Resolve Hunting & Survival Damage: Total the attack power ($///$) of all your successfully activated traits. Compare it against the opponent’s total active defense ($\bigoplus$); any unmitigated power inflicts direct damage to their population counter.
• Evolve or Prune Pool Traits: Take turns choosing a card from the communal trait pool. Either pass a designated skill check to Buy the card into your discard pile to adapt into Felidae (cats), Ursidae (bears), or Mustelidae (weasels), or bypass the check to Prune (permanently remove) a card from the ecosystem to deny it to your rival.
• Natural Selection Pruning: Whenever your deck runs out and you must reshuffle your discard pile, natural selection forces you to pick one card in your graveyard and permanently banish it from the game.

🧠 Why you’ll like it

It is an incredibly clever hybrid of a deckbuilder and a tactical RPG that elegantly simulates macroevolution. Instead of letting you build an infinitely massive deck, the game forces constant thinning via natural selection every time your deck cycles—forcing you to intentionally leave weaker traits behind in the fossil record. Balancing the safety of universal modifiers against the risky dice rolls required to activate high-tier predator apex traits creates an exceptional layer of prehistoric tension.