Beschrijving
Dominant Species: Marine
Sixty-Something Millions of Years Ago — A great ice age has ended. With massive warming altering the globe, another titanic struggle for supremacy has unwittingly commenced between the varying animal species. Dominant Species: Marine is a game that abstractly recreates a small portion of ancient history: the ending of an onerous ice age and what that entails for the living creatures trying to adapt to the slowly-changing earth.
Gameplay
Each player will assume the role of one of four major aquatic-based animal classes — reptiles, fish, cephalopod or crustacean. Each begins the game more or less in a state of natural balance in relation to one another. But that won’t last: It is indeed “survival of the fittest.”
Through wily action pawn placement, you will attempt to thrive in as many different habitats as possible in order to claim powerful card effects. You will also want to propagate your individual species in order to earn victory points for your animal. You will be aided in these endeavors via speciation, migration and adaptation actions, among others.
All of this eventually leads to the end game – the final ascent of a vast tropical ocean and its shorelines – where the player having accumulated the most victory points will have their animal crowned the Dominant Species. But somebody better become dominant quickly, because there’s a large asteroid heading this way….
The action pawns drive the game. Each pawn allows a player to perform the various actions that can be taken—such as speciation, environmental change, migration or evolution. When placed on the action display, a pawn will immediately trigger that particular action for its owning player. Dominant Species: Marine includes new “special” pawns that can be acquired during the course of play. These special pawns have enhanced placement capabilities over the “basic” pawns that each player begins the game with.
Generally, players will be trying to enhance their own animal’s survivability while simultaneously trying to hinder that of their opponents’.
Summarised
Dominant Species: Marine is much quicker than the overlong original game, more dynamic and fluid. It’s an amazing cutthroat area-control game with harsh interactions and lots of potential for planning.
