What is Dominant Species?

Dominant Species (DS) is a game of adaptation and survival in the face of an encroaching ice age. Players take on the role of 1 of 6 major animal classes: mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians, arachnids, and insects. They select and execute actions to improve their animals’ chances of survival and dominance over other species. The player who accumulates the most victory points (VPs) when the ice age reaches its zenith wins and is crowned the dominant species.

[caption id="attachment_286319" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Setup for a 3-player game[/caption]

Each game turn is divided into 3 phases. The first of these is the Planning Phase, where players take turns placing an Action Pawn (AP) on an empty action space on the board’s Action Display. In the Execution Phase, starting from the top action and working down and left-to-right, players take actions removing their APs as they do so. Finally, during the Reset Phase, players check if any species has gone extinct, determine which player has the greatest survival, and then prepare the board for the next turn.

The playing area consists of hexagonal spaces on which players can place Wanderlust Tiles depicting different types of terrain. During the game, players will place their species cubes onto these tiles, as well…

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“Gosh, this feels like that game where, you know…you know?”

After my first play of Vaalbara (2023, Studio H), I was struggling to use my words. But, it wasn’t just me who had this problem—no, it was the same issue my friend Gideon was having while we were trying to place the game against others we had recently played.

Vaalbara is beautiful. The box cover and the cards, featuring artwork from the duo of Felix Donadio and Alexandre Reynaud, are fantastic. The cards feel great in the hands and there’s a really short set of instructions; paired with a small box and straightforward teach, the entire package screams “tidy.”

I wish it screamed “all-time classic”, but such is the state of the gaming world. Vaalbara is entertaining, but the lack of innovation makes Vaalbara a tough call.

I’m Thinking About Using the #8 Card

Vaalbara is a nine-round game of conquest between 2-5 players serving as clan leaders looking to expand their territory. Using a sort-of secret scoring system and a deck of 12 identical character cards, players must outscore the competition to achieve victory.

Each deck of cards features the same 12 characters—drawn with the same 12 pictures, so each clan looks the same save for the…

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From the 1870s to the 1890s, a couple fellows named Marsh and Cope took paleontology battles to a whole new level. You know how it goes. First Cope assembles a skeleton backwards placing the head on the tail (been there, done that) and is humiliated by Marsh. Then Marsh pays off the field crew to send the good fossils his way and all heck breaks loose between the two.

But the “Bone Wars,” as they came to be known, were as fruitful as they were dirty. More than 130 species were discovered by the two rivals—a frantic pace of exploration indeed. If you’re like me, you’ve long waited to take part in such a battle all your own, only with the dinosaur heads mostly on the proper end. Well, the wait is over.

Holotype: Mesozoic North America is the first title from publisher Brexwerx games and designers Brett Harrison and Lex Terenchin. Players take up the role of Paleontologists competing (peacefully, I trust) to publish their way to the peaks of academia—or perhaps the high deserts of academia would be more favorable in this case.

What do you call a paleontologist who naps on the job?

What makes Holotype fascinating as a worker placement game is the hierarchy of worker meeples. Each player begins the game with a…

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I’ve overheard several people describe Endless Winter: Paleoamericans (EW) as a collection of minigames, or a series of different mechanisms bolted together. I think quite the opposite. It is a quintessentially modern hobbyist game that has clearly seen meticulous development and playtesting, and a game where there are many pathways to victory. It is one of the cleaner designs I’ve played in recent memory—in fact, I find it a bit too clean, a bit too smooth. 

The premise of EW is that you’re managing a tribe of cave people (I’m no scientist, but this game has no pretensions towards any kind of historical or scientific fidelity), and you wanna grow that tribe, build camps, and probably lay down some big flat megalith stones. 

[caption id="attachment_266131" align="aligncenter" width="768"] A two-player contest.[/caption]

It’s easy to see why people would describe the game as a mishmash of mechanisms. There’s a shared random hex tile board where you place camps to try and capitalize on scoring opportunities; a separate board where you build a little stacking tile puzzle; a market for buying fancy power cards; a market for adding people to your deck; a set collection puzzle with animal cards; deckbuilding; worker placement; and, TWO tracks. It’s basically the greatest hits of eurogames from the past…

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If you’re on our site, then you probably know the brand: CATAN Studio, the world of CATAN, all the CATAN board games…at this point, CATAN is synonymous with “the hobby.”

So, let’s not get bogged down in what CATAN is, or what it stands for in our space. CATAN: Dawn of Humankind (2022, CATAN Studio) is the newest addition and is a reimplementation of 2002’s Settlers of the Stone Age.

This new version has created two questions that I still can’t answer:

1. Why the game’s title places CATAN in all capital letters, and more importantly,
2. What is the market for CATAN: Dawn of Humankind (CATAN DoH)?

It’s the market for this game that will be the focus of our article. By the end, I think I have a guess, but I welcome your insights!

It’s All About the Flint

CATAN DoH is definitely a CATAN game. The first player to earn 10 points wins. There are hexes, resources, towns, and two dice. Settling on hexes that have higher chances of producing is still a good thing, and rolling a seven is still a bad thing, especially if you want to get resources or you don’t have anyone to rob. There’s still a robber, too. This time…

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Yes, Oceans: Legends of the Deep has flying whales.

No, they aren’t some secret branch of evolution that the government has kept hidden from you.

Yes, they are entirely fictional, fantastical and kinda funny.

Here’s the thing though: Legends of the Deep also features Ahuizotl. The rulebook and some internet searching tell me that Ahuizotl were a water dog from Aztec mythology that lured people to the water’s edge with the sound of a baby crying, grabbing them with a hand at the end of their tail to feast on their eyes, nails and teeth. Alex Shiga’s illustration of them is about as creepy as all that sounds.

I don’t know about you, but I’d never heard of the Ahuizotl before. I’d also never heard of the Finnish sea monster Iku-Turso, the Hawaiian guardian shark Ka’ahupāhau, the West African orisha spirit Olokun, or the Japanese yōkai Umibōzu. In fact, of the 17 myths and deities included in the expansion (along with seven entirely fictional entities), I knew of a grand total of three.

Much like the base game, then, Legends of the Deep is largely educational, with a few frivolous fabrications chucked in for fun.

It’s a shame that most people initially focussed on those damn flying whales…

Magical Myth-ery…

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I remember first hearing about Oceans and being a bit chuffed off.

I’m an admirer of the Evolution series, interested in board games with depth and am part-seal myself so you’d think I would have dived straight into Oceans.

But with Evolution: Climate having only just been delivered to Kickstarter backers in late 2016 and Evolution: The Oceans (as it was then) announced in early 2017, it felt as if publisher North Star Games were abandoning Climate before its pledge manager had even cooled. The result was that I viewed the Oceans Kickstarter campaign with bitterness, failing to see Oceans as anything but a cynical attempt to get fans to fork out for another entire game based on the same underlying system.

Shows what I know.

Oceans is, for me, the pinnacle of all branches of the Evolution board game tree.

Setting the Ocean Colour Scene

As with all games in the Evolution series, the goal of Oceans is to create animals that out-compete your opponents’ animals for limited food supplies. Through clever card play you create new species, give your species colourful traits to help them vie for food, and influence the availability of food resources.

However, Oceans deviates from its forebears in some interesting ways, creating an experience…

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I love Othello. I’ve played it my entire life, mostly on the same set that even now is sitting in the downstairs closet of my mother’s house. It's an area control game played with flippable chips. The goal is to trap one or more of your opponent’s pieces between two of your own, so you can flip them to your color. When the game ends, the player with the most tokens on the board is the winner.

Othello may have been created in 1983, but to me it feels like chess, backgammon, or checkers. It has the gestalt of a game that was played on hot summer days in a Constantinople marketplace. Othello has always been there.

This is the first time I've thought about Othello critically, and it’s apparent how influential the game has been in laying the foundations for nearly all of my gaming preferences. It’s a highly interactive zero-luck two player area control game with perfect information and simple rules that can be taught and internalized with minimal effort. If you wanted a shortcut to describing my favorite games, you could do worse.

Something about Great…

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Buy Prehistories on Amazon

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Have you got your spears sharpened? Got some comfortable hides strapped to your feet? Ready to have your mind blown by this thing called “fire”?

Good! In that case, hello, and welcome to the Stone Age! It may come as a shock to you, but there’s a lot to see and do outside of these confines you’ve grown accustomed to. The world, as they say, is your oyster. Don’t worry. You’ll discover oysters eventually and that saying will make a whole lot more sense. For now, just sit back and enjoy the ride the walk.

In Fire & Stone, you will be working to spread your tribe’s influence across the surface of this new world. As you explore this vast world, you will be gathering food for your tribe, inventing new technologies to make your journey a little easier, and creating settlements along the way.

Fire & Stone features a little bit of point-to-point movement, some area control, and even a bit of tableau building. On a player’s turn, they will move one of their scouts around the board to either discover new tiles, forage for vegetables, hunt animals, or construct settlements—all in the quest for those all-important victory points. Once the eleventh Hut tile is discovered, the game will come to an end and the person with the…

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If you have been around the hobby of gaming over the last 5 years—or gone shopping at your local Target’s gaming section in that same time frame—you have likely seen the game Kingdomino, one of the most celebrated casual games of our generation. It was nominated for, or outright won, every major gaming award in 2017 culminating in the Spiel des Jahres award that year. (Our team loved Kingdomino too.)

I’ve owned a copy of Kingdomino for a couple years and yes, I bought my copy at Target. That version came with a handy domino tower so that I didn’t have to fiddle with something as arduous as stacking dominos on my own. (I’m lazy.)

Publisher Blue Orange Games (known as just Blue Orange in Europe) has gone to the well aplenty with the Kingdomino brand: the Age of Giants expansion, Kingdomino Duel, Dragonimo (a kid’s version of Kingdomino!), and Queendomino, a standalone game that builds on the base game’s mechanics as a reportedly more strategic entry in this series. I have not played any of these other games, but all have been generally well received by our team and the tabletop media at large.

Kingdomino: Origins, the newest entry in this family, arrived on my doorstep for Thanksgiving.…

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