And even an independent completely random version about mutations. However, the game mechanics had several serious flaws - almost everything was decided by the last round and some of the ability cards ruined the balance.
As a result, the rules were seriously revised and a completely new version of the game was released, calling it “Evolution. Natural selection".
I bought it at the Playeron festival - it was simply cheaper there. The box is large, but there is a lot of empty space left in it.
The board game "Evolution. Natural Selection" includes:
1 Watering hole board, 180 food tokens, 24 animal boards, 48 wooden markers, 129 property cards, 6 food bags, 6 player aids, 1 First player sign, game rules
Let's look at the contents.
A cute dinosaur figurine to represent the player who has the right to make the first move. However, to speed up the process, some of the actions can be done simultaneously.
Maps of animal properties - all kinds of horns, long necks, shells and other fat reserves. I think they are very beautifully designed. I should note that the mechanics of the game have changed quite a lot. Now everything - the creation of animals, and the increase in their size (new), and their populations (also new!) and their nutrition, comes from the cards that are in the player’s hand.
Yes, animals now acquire a card with population size and body size levels.
Points are counted by how animals survive and feed. The chips are stored in cute bags. At the end of the game we count. Whoever has accumulated more wins.
For each player there are cards with reminders of the rules
The essence of the game is to create animals with different properties and see who will survive and who will not. Who will have enough food, and who will become the prey of a predator. Each turn, a food supply, animals, their sizes, their numbers, and their properties are created from the cards in hand.
As a result, when playing, the table looked something like this:
What I didn’t really like was the loss of the ability to create a special creature with many properties. And in the original version of Evolution, the fact of the random formation of the food base did not bother me. Somehow the game has become easier, but I won’t take off a star.
Which demonstrated the potential of domestic game designers and began a victorious march around the world. Over time, the game fizzled out a little and before publication in America it needed new colors to attract spoiled board gamers. The new version was such a success that it received several prestigious awards abroad and a bunch of rave reviews. As a result, the circle is closed and now Natural selection comes out again in Russian :)
Your goal in the game is to create and reproduce various types of animals. On their turn, by discarding cards, participants can create the new kind or increase the size or population of existing individuals. You can also lay out cards in front of you, giving your animals all sorts of useful properties from shell and horns to the ability to become a predator and hunt their fellows. At the end of the round, you have to feed everyone you have tamed by throwing food into a special bag. The participant with the most voracious and numerous fauna wins.
A delightful game for the whole family
Here we have an excellent example of working on mistakes: the authors took into account all the small complaints about the original game and produced as perfect a product as possible. Natural selection- this is one of the most atmospheric strategies about animal world, when you will be able to observe with your own eyes how your individuals gradually multiply and acquire more and more useful mutations. New Evolution will be an excellent choice for both a family evening and for hardcore board gamers.
A real candidate of biological sciences took part in the creation of the original game, which led to the creation of realistic gameplay. For registration new version the creators went even further and invited Katherine Hamilton, which specializes specifically in animal drawings. The result of this symbiosis are wonderful watercolor illustrations that show us what species could have existed if evolution had taken a different path.
In addition to the excellent design, we have a solid content of the box, which has grown significantly in size. Inside there was a place for a nice watering hole, and for cardboard food tokens, and even for rag bags, where it is so convenient to store the eaten supplies. Concern for participants is visible in everything, right down to the double-sided view boards, which can be positioned horizontally or vertically depending on the number free space. There was also a pleasant surprise - the first player's token is made in the form of one of sixteen unique dinosaurs that are found at random.
More than a million species of living beings inhabit all corners of our planet. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution explains the reasons for their stunning biodiversity.
Thanks to natural selection, individuals that are better adapted to their environment survive and pass on their beneficial features descendants. Now, after thousands and even millions of years, we can only marvel at how something like this could have happened naturally!
In Evolution, you yourself become part of the mechanism of nature and can see with your own eyes how your animals evolve, adapt and reproduce, or die out, losing in competition with more successful and efficient species.
Next, we will briefly tell you how to play Evolution. Of course, this is not a verbatim retelling of the game rules. You'll get an idea of how the game plays, and for the subtleties and nuances, refer to the rules, which you can download on this page! At the very beginning, each player receives a bag for storing consumed food tokens and a tablet of one type of animal. The player places two wooden cubes in convenient recesses on the tablet: these are the basic values populations And body size.
The course of the game is divided into rounds. At the beginning of the round, each player draws 3 cards from the properties deck, plus one card for each type of animal. Accordingly, at the beginning of the game these are four cards, since each player has one type of animal.
There is a number in the lower right corner of each card. Players place one card face down on the watering hole board. These cards will later determine how much food will be available for sustenance. 
Players can place the remaining cards, again face down, near their animal boards. Cards can also be discarded to gain more animal species or to increase the population and body size of existing species. 
Then comes the moment of truth! All cards laid face down on the table are revealed. Players are recognized Yu t, how much food is at the watering hole. The properties they assigned to their animals using cards come into play. 
And then it turns out that...
There is not enough food for everyone. Animals with long necks manage to grab food before others. Cooperation makes it possible for two or more species to feed themselves at once. Gluttonous animals “eat” two tokens at a time. Any tricks are used! Yes, yes, all this happens due to the property cards that players have distributed between species!
But that's not all. It turns out that one of the animals became a predator (or maybe more, or all remained herbivores). The predator can no longer consume plant food from a watering hole. His food is other species!
But someone has learned to climb and is hiding in the treetops, and if the predator has not developed the same property, he will not be able to reach the climber. Another animal has grown a strong shell, and someone has gained such body mass that he doesn’t care about a small predator... unless he gains weight or starts hunting in packs!
The predator reduces the population of other animals by receiving meat food, or dies itself. Herbivores that do not get plant food lose their population, or even die out. The same thing happens in living nature! Survival of the fittest.
Then all the “eaten” food tokens are sent to the players’ bags, and a new round begins.
Property maps assigned various types animals, stay with them. Each animal can have up to three attributes, and players must choose how to evolve their pets. If necessary, properties can be changed by replacing them with new cards. 
The game ends when the attribute deck runs out. Players count victory points. They are given for tokens of food eaten, for the population of surviving animals, and for the property cards assigned to them. Thus, the player whose species has proven itself to be the most efficient during the evolutionary process wins the game!
Opponents rarely can do anything.
Firstly, to attack you need a predator with a body mass of 2, and this is -2 cards out of three available in the hand in the first round, and only if you are lucky. It is not always the case that a predator gets caught during a distribution, but there is an opportunity to exchange cards for tablets regardless of the distribution.
Secondly, even if someone makes a predator on 2 cards, then I lose only 1 animal and at the end of the second round I have 3x, and the player with the predator and the rest have only 2. My gaming advantage is +1 card in the next hand.
Thirdly, for the opponents to start actively doing something, it is necessary for such a player to go first and everyone to see it.
Bottom line: opponents need a fair amount of luck to resist, and they lag behind in development.
You must have played some other version of the game...
As described above, everything in the game is normal with balance.
1. not necessary. All you need is the “pack attack” card and you’ll start growing the population. The probability of its appearance is the same as that of any other card. The same cannot be said about the Predator card - they are the majority in the deck.
2. A couple of times your animal will be eaten (not necessarily by one person) - and you will be completely left without cards and software. And the predators - they will kill you safely.
3. Completely optional. Does the word “planning” mean something to you? A good player, seeing what is going on on the table, knows what cards and where to play. The opponent is gaining mass - we are trying to surpass him. If this is not possible, we look for other possibilities. Yes, no one has canceled chance - and a card successfully played by an opponent can ruin plans, but putting everything all-in... that's still an idea. It doesn’t matter at all whether the cards are played one by one or simultaneously.
Bottom line: it’s not your game and you simply don’t know how to “cook” it. That is, as was said above, the problems are not of the game, but of the participants.
Tired of repeating yourself repeatedly, or you're not listening carefully. Everything described above applies to round 1-2!!! Even Radoslav wrote in black and white: “If at the very beginning of the game you massively lay out new animal boards...” About what “an attack by a pack is enough” we're talking about? Each player has 4 CARDS in their hands, and after discarding ONLY THREE! Take the deck in your hands, draw 4 cards from it at random, on which try will you end up with “predator + pack attack”? And you will get one predator in less than 50% of cases. You reason as if at the very beginning of the game you have some choice from all sorts of aggressive strategies, and any cards for every taste. And not everyone who receives it plays this card in the first round. Well, if they play, they’ll eat at most one. And it’s not a fact that you have.
I played with different players of different experience levels. +3 and +2 tablets at the very beginning give a very big advantage over the others, as in any computer strategy, where in the first minutes it is more important to get more resources. I probably need to learn how to “cook” somehow correctly in order to start losing, I’ll try.
But the statistics don’t agree with you at all. Play online and compare;) How many such attempts were there at the start to place 4-5 animals, and such players simply consistently take 3+ place. Maybe in a game for two, of course, everything is different, but 3+, there’s simply no chance. By the way, surprisingly, a strategy from one big beast can even work quite effectively, although not always. If they don’t eat you, they will starve you, but if you are prudent in terms of hunger (long neck + cooperation + nobility), then they will definitely eat you in the end)
Opponents rarely can do anything.
Firstly, to attack you need a predator with a body mass of 2, and this is -2 cards out of three available in the hand in the first round, and only if you are lucky. It is not always the case that a predator gets caught during a distribution, but there is an opportunity to exchange cards for tablets regardless of the distribution.
Secondly, even if someone makes a predator on 2 cards, then I lose only 1 animal and at the end of the second round I have 3x, and the player with the predator and the rest have only 2. My gaming advantage is +1 card in the next hand.
Thirdly, for the opponents to start actively doing something, it is necessary for such a player to go first and everyone to see it.
Bottom line: opponents need a fair amount of luck to resist, and they lag behind in development.
You must have played some other version of the game...
As described above, everything in the game is normal with balance.
1. not necessary. All you need is the “pack attack” card and you’ll start growing the population. The probability of its appearance is the same as that of any other card. The same cannot be said about the Predator card - they are the majority in the deck.
2. A couple of times your animal will be eaten (not necessarily by one person) - and you will be completely left without cards and software. And the predators - they will kill you safely.
3. Completely optional. Does the word “planning” mean something to you? A good player, seeing what is going on on the table, knows what cards and where to play. The opponent is gaining mass - we are trying to surpass him. If this is not possible, we look for other possibilities. Yes, no one has canceled chance - and a card successfully played by an opponent can ruin plans, but putting everything all-in... that's still an idea. It doesn’t matter at all whether the cards are played one by one or simultaneously.
Bottom line: it’s not your game and you simply don’t know how to “cook” it. That is, as was said above, the problems are not of the game, but of the participants.
Tired of repeating yourself repeatedly, or you're not listening carefully. Everything described above applies to round 1-2!!! Even Radoslav wrote in black and white: “If at the very beginning of the game you massively lay out new animal boards...” What kind of “enough pack attack” are we talking about? Each player has 4 CARDS in their hands, and after discarding ONLY THREE! Take the deck in your hands, draw 4 cards from it at random, on which try will you end up with “predator + pack attack”? And you will get one predator in less than 50% of cases. You reason as if at the very beginning of the game you have some choice from all sorts of aggressive strategies, and any cards for every taste. And not everyone who receives it plays this card in the first round. Well, if they play, they’ll eat at most one. And it’s not a fact that you have.
I played with different players of different experience levels. +3 and +2 tablets at the very beginning give a very big advantage over the others, as in any computer strategy, where in the first minutes it is more important to get more resources. I probably need to learn how to “cook” somehow correctly in order to start losing, I’ll try.
But the statistics don’t agree with you at all. Play online and compare;) How many such attempts were there at the start to place 4-5 animals, and such players simply consistently take 3+ place. Maybe in a game for two, of course, everything is different, but 3+, there’s simply no chance. By the way, surprisingly, a strategy from one big beast can even work quite effectively, although not always. If they don’t eat you, they will starve you, but if you are prudent in terms of hunger (long neck + cooperation + nobility), then they will definitely eat you in the end)
