🎯 The Goal
Design a sustainable prehistoric food chain as a powerful deity who simply loves dinosaurs, strategically multiplying populations of prey and predators to feed your massive apex reptiles so they can lay high-scoring victory eggs.
⚙️ Core Actions
Players take turns expanding their personal ecosystem grids using double-sided landscape tiles drawn from a shared central marketplace:
- Expand the Habitats: Draft a double-hex terrain tile and snap it into your individual world grid. There are no placement penalties for mismatched edges, but keeping matching terrain types linked gives your future wildlife optimal space to flourish.
- Introduce New Life: If the tile you just added features a printed critter symbol, instantly pull a corresponding wooden meeple from the central pool and birth it onto that location.
- Trigger Global Reproductions: The market board features distinct columns for each animal type. The exact moment a column is completely emptied of tiles, all players simultaneously activate that creature type across their personal grids.
- Manage Prey Expansion: When small prey (frogs, rabbits, or rats) activate, every single surviving meeple duplicates by placing an offspring into a vacant, adjacent hex of its favored terrain type.
- Unleash Predator Hunts: When predators (tigers or eagles) activate, they march across your landscape to hunt. Eating one piece of prey allows them to survive; eating additional prey pieces causes new predators to instantly spawn on the map. Predators that finish an activation without eating immediately starve and are removed.
- Feed the Overlord Dinosaurs: When the central dinosaur token lines up with an activated column, your terror-lizards wake up to rampage across up to five spaces. They can swallow anything to stay alive, but only by hunting predators will they lay eggs (which act as your final victory points or can be spent to hatch more dinosaurs). Dinosaurs must finish their hunt resting safely back on a mountain hex or they die out.
🧠 Why you’ll like it
It takes the grand, daunting calculations of natural science and genome-splicing games and distills them into a beautifully clever, highly accessible spatial puzzle. The core mechanical tension is beautifully cyclical: you want your prey to overrun the valleys so your predators have a buffet, but if your predators overeat, they will trigger a mass starvation right before your dinosaurs activate. It provides zero direct player conflict but thrives on delicious passive-aggressive timing—allowing you to glance at an opponent’s board and purposely empty a column to force a starvation phase right when their defenses are entirely down.