GMT is a game company mostly known for their hex and counter wargames, so when they decided to publish the eurogame Dominant Species a lot of people were surprised. However, don’t be fooled; this is a heavier, meatier experience than your average eurogame that will provide plenty of challenge for your average wargamer, while being approachable enough to appeal to a wider audience.
This is a worker-placement game with a map made of up hexagonal tiles, where the object is to score, you guessed it, victory points (yes, it is a euro). Each player plays as one of six “animals”; mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians, arachnids, and insects. It can be played 2-6 players, and depending on the number of players each player receives a certain number of cubes (called “species”) and action pawns, which are cylinders. Each player also has a set of cones to mark dominance on the map. These pieces are all painted wood and are good quality.
The game comes with a mounted board with most of the board covered by a superimposed hex grid. On the board, but off to the side of the map, is the action area, which is where action pawns are placed to claim actions. The map starts with a pre-determined 7 terrain tiles on it, and during the game additional cardboard tiles are drawn and placed on the map. The tiles are a thick cardstock and are solid quality as well. The general artwork theme uses washed out earthtones that I think looks great, it provides a nice backdrop without distracting. There are tiles for different types of habitats such as mountains, desert, wetlands, forest, etc.
There are smaller white tiles to place over the top of the regular tiles and represent tundra. As the game goes on, the tundra will also grow, wiping out previously fertile tiles and converting them to tunda which is a much harsher environment. The effect simulates an oncoming ice age which is part of the theme. In my opinion the tundra tiles could have been a little larger so they covered up more of the original tile, but that’s a minor complaint.
The game also comes with a small deck of 25 “Dominance” cards, 6 player reference sheets (one for each animal type), and a felt bag (yes a felt bag) full of small cardboard discs that have 1 of 6 “elements” on them. These are placed on the corners of the hexagon tiles to represent the presence of elements certain animals need to survive, such as sun, grubs, or grass. The cardboard discs are probably my other complaint. They are an important part of the game, and the artwork is fine, but it felt like they could have been a little larger and thicker considering how much they were being handled.
Gameplay revolves around the players alternating placing action pawns on the action box, and then after all action pawns have been placed the actions are run through in order, executing the action of each pawn in a certain sequence. i won’t attempt to go into the available actions in too great of detail, but there are actions to manipulate the elements on the board (to try to make areas of the board more favorable to your animal type), add terrain tiles to the board (both regular tiles and tundra), add more of your cubes to the board, move your cubes around on the board, kill opposing cubes, etc. There are a LOT of actions available and it takes time to learn exactly what each one does, so the game has a fairly steep learning curve. Even after you understand what each action does, understand which actions are the most beneficial to you at any given time requires a lot of deep thought.
Probably the most interesting aspect of the gameplay is the concept of “dominance”. Having cubes on a tile lets you vie for dominance, which is calculated by looking at the elements adjacent to that tile and comparing them to the elements on each players sheet. Each animal type starts with certain elements on their sheet, and you can add more by “adapting” your animal to new elements. The better your animal matches the elements adjacent to the tile, the higher you score for dominance; the player with the highest dominance score puts a cone on the tile of their color as a marker. just to give you a really simple example: Lets say there is a desert tile with 2 sun elements and 1 grass element adjacent to it. An insect and a reptile are both present. The reptiles start with 2 sun elements on their sheet, while the insects start with 2 grass elements. The reptiles thus has a dominance score of “4”, since their 2 sun elements, multiplied by the number of sun elements adjacent, is 4. The insects have a dominance score of “2”, since their 2 grass elements, multiplied by the number of grass elements adjacent (1), equals 2. If the insects were to add 3 more grass elements to their sheet, that would up their dominance score to 5 and they would take over dominance in that tile.
Dominance matters because taking the domination action, and choosing to score a tile where you have dominance (even if you don’t have the most cubes) lets you take a domination card which have wacky and usually incredibly powerful effects such as giving you an additional action pawn, eliminating a bunch of cubes from the map, or other helpful effects.
Players earn VP from a variety of actions. Placing tiles and tundra tiles gives VP, having the most animals surviving on the tundra gives you VP, and scoring tiles where you have cubes using the domination action gives you VP. At the end of the game every tile is scored one last time, and each player also receives bonus points depending on the number of tiles they are dominant in on the final board setup. It seems you score roughly 50-60% of your points with the final scoring, but its nice that all the jockeying for position ends up mattering at the end scoring. It also makes it difficult to tell who is actually in the lead which keeps a multiplayer game more competitive.
The two biggest downsides to the gameplay are the dominance mechanic and the domination cards. Both provide immense richness and strategy to the game so I’m not criticizing their inclusion so much as lamenting the amount of complexity that they add. The domination mechanic basically amounts to book keeping, since the elements on the map and on each players sheet are changing fairly frequently. It’s very easy for domination of a particular tile to change several times in a short time-frame and its up to the players to keep track and change the dominance cone as required. This is annoying because domination actually doesn’t matter the vast majority of the time, but the two times it does matter (during a domination action and at the end of the game) it is incredibly important. The domination cards allow for some very cool and thematic effects but require extra time for each player to understand what each card does as they are laid out, since each player has to decide if they want to take domination actions to get a chance to play cards or not. This slows the game down especially for new players who have never seen any of the cards before and may have a harder time understanding what they do.
That said, the reward for mastering this complexity is rich, rich gameplay. The clean, smooth worker placement mechanic, combined with the complexities of the board situation, the domination/scoring mechanic, and the domination cards results in a brilliant interaction of different game elements. Most importantly, Dominant Species benefits from euro mechanics while avoiding two pitfalls of euro games (at least as far as wargamers are concerned):
1. Overly mechanical player decisions. Often euro mechanics are so clean and clearly defined that optimal play sometimes becomes too obvious. Dominant Species avoids this with a healthy dose of pure chaos; drawing land tiles, drawing elements from the bag, and a huge amount of player competition are constantly shaking up the game situation and preventing too much planning ahead.
2. Player conflict. Most euro designs downplay or even exclude entirely player conflict, i.e. the ability of players to harm each others game states. Dominant Species doesn’t only allow it, it encourages it through various mechanisms. If you aren’t out there picking off your opponents cubes, or using the dominance cards to mess with them, you haven’t got a chance. This is a bloodthirsty game of intense competition and players need to understand that going in.
Playtime is going to be around 3 hours. It is playable on a long weeknight session, especially with players who are very familiar with the game mechanics, but this is a heavy game and plan for it accordingly. Theoretically playtime should be similar regardless of the number of players due to the clever mechanism of reducing the number of action pawns per player in larger games. In reality of course having more players can slow the game down anyways, but hopefully the action pawn limiting helps to even it out more compared to a lot of other games.
A last note on the theme, it is a little abstracted. The cubes don’t actually represent a number of animals, instead they represent “species”, and your limited supply of cubes is termed your “gene pool”. So having multiple cubes in a tile actually represents diversity of your animal present. Many of the game elements may not make thematic sense, for example you can have a wetlands with no water element, or a desert with no sun element. However, overall the theme is a complete success in my opinion. Another common criticism of eurogames is that the theme feels “tacked on”, but that is not the case here. The theme comes through in every single action of the game, you can feel the tension as the species vie with each other for dominance over tiles, while gradually spreading out over the growing map ahead of the coming ice age.
As usual, tons more information is available at the Boardgamegeek entry. I haven’t tried too hard to explain all the game mechanics, if you are interested in a more detailed explanation there are some great reviews on Boardgamegeek. GMT has also made the rulebook available online along with some other resources at their website for the game. A really good resource for learning the game is episode 24 of the “How To Play” podcast, where Ryan Sturm does a great job explaining how the game works in depth.
Overall, after 1 play (which I lost horribly after the final scoring despite spending most of the game in the lead), I would rate it:
Last word in paragraph 6 has a typo. Also, ou didnt make it clear if you have played this game or not, or even why you are reviewing it…
Everybody’s a critic.
I’m intrigued by the theme of this game. I’ve often thought that evolutionary processes would be fascinating to model in game form. The way different strategies reward different species in different ways, in different places has always intrigued me–consider the very different strategies between, say, oak trees and grass.
Back when we first made Statecraft for Lorraine’s World Government class, I toyed with the idea for a plant evolution game for my biology class, but the mechanics never quite came together for me.
I’d like to try this one out, though. What kind of 1-10 score do you give it?
Yes we did play it and thoroughly enjoyed it, but this post was already so long I didn’t want to add a session report to the end of it. I’m reviewing it because I played it and I thought you guys might be interested in learning what I thought of it.
I would say the game is about adaptation more than evolution, though some of the domination cards hint at major evolutionary developments.
I do need to add a rating though. After only one play I’d say its already up in the 8 category, though that could change up or down with more plays in the future. Not sure if I would purchase it right now though, due to the longer playtime.