German Thal: Primordial Soup is a board game that is about evolution:http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/124
Ninfa Asby: I remember a GREAT game about evolution named TYRANNO EX. More information about it can be found here:http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/719Published (in the US) by Avalon Hill in the early '90s, the goal of the game was to make sure that the dinosaurs that you had in play were able to advance to the next epoch of time (evolve) by making sure that their environment of choice was well stocked and preserved to support life native to the environment. Players are dealt a hand of dinosaur cards and put them into play in their native environment on the board. Each turn, you are able to draw counters from a cup and use the counters to stock an environment with different types of food, sunlight, water, etc. to help strengthen that environment. The round of play (epoch) ends after each player has taken a number of turns drawing counters and playing them o! n the game board. At the end of each round the dinosaurs duke it out and the ones that are native to environments that are well preserved/stocked have combat bonuses and a greater chance of surviving and evolving. Each player receives a few new dinosaur cards at the beginning of each new epoch and the game ends when the last epoch is played out. The player in control of the most powerful dinosaurs at the end is the winner.Hopefully, that can provide you with some inspiration. Have fun!...Show more
Wilmer Skidmore: The suggestions given already are OK, but if the idea is to come up ith one of your own, you may need to start a different way. You need three things:1) A Win Condition ***VERY IMPORTANT**2) A Progression3) A Monetary System OK, for an explanation of the three - #1 - The Win Condition can be as simple as - first one to the end (or first one to evolve) wins, the last one left wins (the player with the most pieces left after natural selection has weeded m! ost of them out), or whoever has the most money (or has saved ! the most acres of rainforest) after X amount of time wins, or first person to 25 points or to collect all of the {{something}} (protect 25 endangered species or collect all of the oil from the oil spill, etc...). The reason you need a win condition first is that you can't lose focus on your objective. Just take the general terms I've outlined here and make them specific to ecology or evolution.Once you've figured out what it will eventually take to win your game, you need to figure out how to get there.#2 - The Progression. You need three things in your Progression:a) driving plotb) balancec) reversal of fortuneThe first part, the driving plot, can be anything - in chutes and ladders, it's that you need to move through lollipop island (or whatever it's called). In Risk, it's to take over the world. In Monopoly, it's to own all of Atlantic City's real estate. In Parcheesi, Sorry, Trouble, Backgammon, Chinese Checkers, etc. it's to bring all of your people home. In Chess, Ch! eckers, Stratego, etc. it's to destroy an opposing army.In your game, it would be something like the ideas I've hinted at above - trying to save endangered species, protect the environment or clean it up after industrial accidents.It could also be the player trying to overcome environmental hardships like climate, predators or disease by evolving as these things begin to affect them during game play.It could be anything. Others might include trying to collect all of the pieces of something so that you can do something (to win the game) with it (such as collecting endangered species of plant and animal to create your own nature preserve), to avoid destruction of your pieces by the game board (the game board could try to weed you out through natural selection unless you or your group of pieces can evolve), or to have tasks set for you by cards or game board spaces that you must accomplish before the other players.The second part of the Progression is that it must have balance! . All of the players must BE ABLE to progress through the game at the s! ame rate.. This may sound obvious, but you may find through test playing your game that a certain common scenario permanently unbalances the game in favor of one player, and the only way for the other players to overcome it is to start a new game. An example might be if Monopoly had a Community Chest Card that said: "You never have to pay rent" Any player who drew that card would be invincible for the rest of the game. Also, try to make cards and game board spaces that have positive AND negative effects, but make them minor. Don't make them so drastic that they can't be overcome in a turn or two or else someone landing on them will be unable to win the game after that.The third part - Reversal of Fortune, is a little trickier to get right without upsetting the Balance. It should be something that can give a player who's losing badly a fighting chance. This could be when you land on Free Parking in Monopoly (an optional rule, I know) and collect a random large sum of money. ! There is a game called "Settlers of Catan" in which you can play a card that forces every player give you ALL of a single type of resource card. These things are things that, while they may hurt another player, don't hurt other players too much while giving a single player a huge TEMPORARY advantage.#3 - A Monetary System. This can be misleading. I'm not saying that every game has to have MONEY. In fact, many games have a monetary system without having money. And a lot of games (like Parcheesi, Sorry, Candy Land, etc.) don't have a monetary system.It just means some way of acquiring something that can be used in trade for multiple game elements. In Risk, it's not only the cards you draw each round for successful battles (which can be turned in IN EXCHANGE FOR a growing amount of armies) but also your land acquisition, as for each 3 territories you control, you receive an additional army. These things work together as the "monetary system" by which players can obtain armies.! In Chess, the monetary system is a bit obscure. You are given 8 pawns. T! hrough wise strategy, you may be able to trade them for a higher piece, as a Rook or Queen.In the game I mentioned above, "Settlers of Catan", there are 5 types of resources that you can acquire. Different combinations of them will allow you to buy different things, such as roads, cities, towns, and even other resources.There are also several different card games like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic that have "energy" or "mana" cards which you can use each round like currency to play other cards in your hand.And, of course, there is money, as in Monopoly, Acquire, Pay Day, Life, etc. The important thing is that the "monetary system" fits your plot. In an ecology game, you might have fundraising spaces on your game board that help players acquire money to accomplish their goals. In an evolution game, currency could come in the form of experience cards that allow you to "buy" your way out of potentially harmful or fatal circumstances that might arise on your game board. (Examp! le: If your game pieces have an experience card that says they're immune to a virus, then when they land on a game board space that says half of them are wiped out by a virus, their 'immunity to a virus' card might help you keep an extra 5 pieces that your opponents would lose without the experience card that your pieces have. This game dynamic implies that in the course of evolutionary history, your pieces are getting better, or 'evolving' more effectively than your opponents' pieces.)In summation, you need to figure out what goal your players are trying to achieve, find out a way for them to amass a form of wealth that they can trade for ways of accomplishing their goal, and then allow them to reach a goal that ends the game. I hoped this helped....Show more
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