Evolution Kickstarter Preview

[This post is not a review, but a preview for a game currently funding on Kickstarter. There may be differences in art, components, or gameplay between the version I played and the version that eventually gets released.]

If you are reading this it is very likely that you have heard of publisher North Star Games. They have put out some of the best party style games on the market, including Wits and Wagers and Say Anything. As of this posting, North Star is...evolving itself by venturing forth into the realm of strategy games.

Evolution is a light-medium card game that puts players in charge of raising and evolving several different species or animals with unique traits that will hopefully help them to survive and thrive. 

Gameplay is pretty straightforward. In the first phase of a round, after being dealt 3 trait cards (plus one for each species she has), each player must discard a card for its food value. These cards will be revealed later during the feeding phase and will determine how much Plant Food will be available for the round.

Next each player (in turn order) can play as many trait cards from her hand as she wishes. At this point, these cards have 3 possible uses.

 - Play the trait card as a new trait that will modify a species a player already has

 - Discard the trait card in order to start a new species

 - Discard the trait card in order to increase by 1 a species' Population or Body Size.

After each player has played as many cards as they wish (players can hold cards from round to round), play moves to the Feeding Phase.

The trait cards that were set aside in the beginning of the round are revealed, and a number of food tokens are put into the "Watering Hole" according to the total of all the revealed cards' Plant Food numbers.

In turn order, players will feed one of their hungry species. The omnivores can take Plant Food from the Watering Hole, and carnivores can attack other species to get their food. After each species can't eat anymore (because there is nothing left in the Watering Hole or because the species has eaten a number of food equal to its population),  some upkeep occurs.

This species was unable to eat 3 food to match its 3 population, so its population must be reduced to 2.

Species that were unable to eat food equal to their population have their population decreased to match the amount of food it was able to eat. Any leftover food in the Watering Hole is left for the next round and any eaten food gets put into each player's food bag (which is the main source of points at the end of the game). Any species that didn't eat any good goes extinct. 

There are some neat combos to be found in the trait cards.

Play continues in this way until the deck of trait cards needs to be reshuffled. Once this happens, one more round is played, and plays tally their scores. Players receive one point for each of the following:

• each food token in her food bag
• each trait card on surviving species 
• each point of population on each surviving species

Evolution is a game that really surprised me. After reading the rules and glancing at some of the cards, I was really not expecting much before my first play. It seemed very simple and I honestly did not think I was going to enjoy my time with it. I was wrong. I would put Evolution in one of my favorite categories of games - super simple to learn and play, and loads of fun to experience and enjoy. 

One thing that I did not enjoy about Evolution (regular readers of mine can probably guess what's next...) - is that because it is a card game, the luck of the draw can give some players a negative experience. For example, there are certain trait cards that protect against attacks from carnivores. In order for a carnivore to counter some of these cards, they themselves have a have a specific trait. On the flip-side, omnivores can be sitting ducks without those defensive traits. Not drawing the trait you need can be pretty frustrating. The good thing about Evolution is that there are plenty of options for players to put unwanted cards to productive use. 

Something along the same lines that I really like about carnivores attacking in Evolution is that as long as the defending species' population is healthy, being the victim is not all that detrimental. Sure, you lose a little bit, but honestly the biggest thing I was worried about when being attacked by carnivores was that by being unable to defend the attack, I was unable to keep the attacking species from eating (and thus, going extinct - bad for opponents = good for me).

My absolute favorite thing about Evolution is just how thematic is feels to me for such a simple card game. Throughout most of my plays of the game, carnivores didn't show up until the mid-game. This was really fun to see. In the beginning of the game, there is usually plenty of food, and not many species yet, and as the players were feeling each other out, everyone was playing nice and remaining peaceful vegetarians. As the game goes on, however, the food at the Watering Hole becomes more and more scarce, as the game becomes more and more populated by hungry vegetarians. Species that can eat other animals appear as a natural consequence of both the food shortage and also by the presence of fat, tasty leaf-eaters. 

North Star Games has made a name for itself by putting out some of the best party games available. After playing the prototype of Evolution, I can confirm that their first foray into the realm of strategy games has not been a misstep. I absolutely recommend checking out the Kickstarter page and backing North Star Game's campaign in order to get a copy of the game. I have had a lot of fun with the game even in its prototype stage - I can't wait to see what the final version looks like on my table. Just like Wits and Wagers, I can see this title being played for years to come. 

Crappy Birthday Review

A new game that North Star Games has come out with (that they are marketing as something to bring to a party instead of a bottle of wine or case of soda) is Crappy Birthday.

If you've played Apples to Apples, then basically you already know how the game is played. Each player has five cards in his hand representing "really awful" birthday gifts (awfulness like beauty is apparently in the eye of the beholder). Players take turns being the person receiving a birthday present. Your job, as someone who apparently hates your friends, is to give them the worst gift imaginable. Do you happen to know that your friend hates heights? Then you should of course give him Skydiving sessions. Does he hate board games? (Then why is he playing?) Then you should of course give him (my personal favorite card) a Crappy Birthday Party (this card is awesome, because it is actually a picture of the people from North Star Games playing Crappy Birthday)! The person who is receiving the gifts then takes all of the cards, shuffles them up, and reveals them to all the players for everyone's amusement. Next, he picks which one is truly his most hated gift and whoever played that card receives a point. The first person to get three points is the winner (and you might be leery when receiving a present from them in the future)!

The first pro for Crappy Birthday is that it is designed to be amusing. Whereas with Apples to Apples (you're going to get a lot of comparisons to this game since they use the same mechanics) you are trying to get the best match, and thus you are supposed to play "seriously" (I always play the funniest one either way; and I rarely win), in Crappy Birthday you are actually playing what you think is the most atrocious - and these are much funnier. So, though Apples to Apples is marketed as a fun game with a lot of laughs, the rules to Crappy Birthday actually encourage this amusement and, in my opinion (which is the one that gets published since I'm the author of the blog) this makes the game much funnier.

The next thing that I liked about Crappy Birthday are the pictures on each card. This is probably the biggest difference to that other game that is named after Apples. In Crappy Birthday, each card has a picture of what this awful gift would look like. After all, what if you weren't really that imaginative and couldn't think up what a Hairless Cat would look like. They provide the picture to help you realize just how horrible of a gift that would be. I must say that some of my favorite pictures (aside from the Crappy Birthday Party mentioned earlier) are the "Decorative Urinal", the "Taxidermy Your Pet", and "A Llama Named Lloyd."

Unfortunately, there are also some cons to Crappy Birthday. Most notably (and ironically, since North Star Games is actually the company that fixed this con in Say Anything) is that if your cards aren't being picked, then you can quickly feel a bit left out of the game. This is a glaring problem to me in both this game and the Fruit game - after a few rounds of playing the card that you think is "perfect" and still not getting picked, it is pretty easy to start eagerly waiting for the game to be over. Say Anything fixed this by allowing you to bet on what answers you think would be picked so that you were always engaged, but I guess that North Star was trying for a simpler game that could more easily be brought and played as a party favor. I'm sad that they re-introduced this con by doing so, however.

The next con that I have for the game is that there are a lot of "horrible presents" that all of my friends would love. For example, I got this game at GenCon, and I played it with my friends who were with me at the convention. (If you read this and don't know what GenCon is, GenCon is a gigantic gaming convention currently held in Indianapolis. Also, since you apparently enjoy games but aren't insanely obsessed with them like me, please share my site with your friends - I like helping people find games that they will like. I think that there's a game out there for just about everyone. Anyway…) Cards like "Star Wars Collection," "Weeklong Renaissance Fair," and "Suit of Armor" aren't ever helpful to play. Everyone that I was playing with would have been very excited to receive any of those things. And so if you are unfortunate enough to draw too many of these wonderful "crappy" birthday presents, then you won't have a chance at winning. (I think the point of the game is to "have fun," but I am very competitive. It's ok, I'm nice to the people I play with while secretly hoping I crush them.) And, yes, I know that my friends are weird. I did start this paragraph by telling you that we were playing it at GenCon, though, so you should've expected that.

Overall, I give Crappy Birthday an 8.0/10. I debated a bit on this game and what I thought the score should be, especially because it's not especially innovative. However, I think the game is solid and, more specifically, I think that North Star really succeeded on their goal for the game - to make a game that you could inexpensively buy and bring to a party and know that you will have fun playing it with a group of friends. I don't think that they were worried with if you would be able to play it dozens of times - I think they were more concerned on whether you could get $15 of enjoyment out of it, and I think you can.

I would like to thank North Star Games for providing me with a review copy of Crappy Birthday.  In addition to being available at Amazon, Crappy Birthday will be available at Barnes & Noble starting September 2011.

Say Anything Review

Another party game that I have played recently (yes, I've played way more of these recently than I normally do) was Say Anything.

In Say Anything (also known as "what Apples to Apples wishes it could be"), players take turns as the moderator. The moderator selects the top card and then picks one of the 6 questions on the card for the other players to supply their best answer to (questions like "In my opinion, what is the best animated movie of all time?" and "In my opinion, what would be the most ridiculous thing that could happen right now?" - and they are all opinion questions). After the moderator has provided a question, each of the other players must write a response on their small dry erase board. The moderator selects which answer is his favorite (at which point Apples to Apples would have ended the round), but in Say Anything, the non-moderator players now have 2 bidding tokens on which they can select which answer they think the moderator has picked! Finally, the moderator reveals the "best" answer, and players score for having supplied that answer, but also for bidding that the moderator would pick that answer. The game goes around until each player has been the moderator twice, and then whoever has the most points wins.

The first thing that I like about Say Anything is that you are able to bid on which answer the moderator will guess. Whereas in many other games like this you can only score points by supplying the "best" answer, I really like that you can score points in different ways in this game. This way, even if you're not quite on the same wavelength as the moderator (they might not think your jokes about Michael Jackson are funny, for example... when they definitely are hilarious), you are still able to score points.  This aspect of the game really keeps players from becoming disengaged in the game.  I have played several party games where certain players thought they were coming up with great answers (yes, I was one of them, but I've also seen it happen to other people), just to have the moderator select someone else's answer; those players normally give up on the game about halfway through.  And that makes the game less fun for everyone.

The next thing that (I think) I like about Say Anything is that the answers aren't supplied for you. This, honestly, can be both good or bad. If you are playing with a group of people that aren't especially creative, then it could be really good to have answers already supplied that you simply pick from. However, if you are playing with creative people, you can get much better answers to questions like "In my opinion, what would be the most shocking secret that someone's mother could reveal?" than would be available on a card. (The winning answer was "Her nipples are on her back; and you were breastfed," just in case you were curious. And as a point of note, there is also a Say Anything: Family Edition that tries to have questions that will get a bit more tame of answers. Though, really, it should be pretty easy to scale the level of "adult" answers based on who is playing.)

Now that you know the pros, I really only had one con for Say Anything. Say Anything has a target number of players that it works best with. The game is officially 3-8 players (and you really can't easily go above 8 players since the game wouldn't really work very well in teams and the "Select-O-Matic" (secret selector for the moderator) only has 8 answers.  Though now that I've started rambling to myself, I guess you could make it more than 8 players if you had extra dry erase boards, and the moderator just wrote who had the best answer.  Anyway...) Unfortunately, I don't think the game is nearly as much fun with 3-4 players, either, because of the limited number of answers and the fact that everyone will be bidding on the same few answers available - you really need 5-8 players to play. This is really unfortunate, since most party games have more of a "the more the merrier" aspect to them. With that said, 3-8 players is actually quite a broad spectrum for most games; it's just somewhat limiting in the party game genre.

Overall, I give Say Anything an 8.5/10. I really enjoy the game, and I think that it has bumped Apples to Apples out of circulation in my gaming world. I would recommend this to anyone that likes party games or that likes games that require creativity.

I would like to thank North Star Games for providing a demo copy of Say Anything for me to play - twice! (They provided one before and one after the tornado.) I would also like to thank them for the generosity they showed towards the people of Joplin by donating several games to the tornado victims in the city.

Wits and Wagers Review

Another game that I found interesting enough to finagle (ahem, "acquire") a copy of was Wits And Wagers.

Wits and Wagers is a "trivia" game. More specifically, it is a party game that happens to use trivia as it's subject matter.  Each game consists of seven questions (there are 700 included in the game). In each question (which all have numerical answers), one person reads the question and then all of the players write down their best guess as to the correct answer (such as how many feet across is the Golden Gate bridge, or how many times could you fit the area of Rhode Island inside of Alaska). All the answers are revealed, and then the players place their wagers on the answer(s) that they think are closest without going over (the players get to wager twice per round at no risk, but can also risk any chips they had previously earned to increase their potential winnings). Whoever bet correctly gets the appropriate payout (anywhere from 2:1 to 6:1), and the person who provided that answer gets a bonus of 3 chips. At the end of the seventh question, whoever has the most chips is the winner.

The first pro to Wits and Wagers is that they have found questions that (most likely) nobody will actually know the answer to. If you, like me, have grown horribly sick of trivia games because you have played Trivial Pursuit far too often with people that can recall anything that they have ever read, then you can really appreciate this pro. This is a game that I can play with my brother (the person I was referring to in the previous sentence), and actually stand a fighting chance. After all, it turns out that he has no idea how old the oldest cat ever was.  He doesn't even know what percent of the United States' land mass is contained in Alaska.  And neither do I.

The second pro is the "wagers" part of wits and wagers (because I just covered the "wits" part, of course). The wagering in the game is first of all very fun. Secondly, I really appreciated that you can't get eliminated in the game. If, like me, you have tons of casinos near you, then you realize that in gambling you are eliminated pretty quickly. Fortunately, in Wits and Wagers, there are two cardboard chips representing your color - you can wager these every round without risking any potential loss, even if you have lost all of your other chips. This keeps everyone engaged in the game, because nobody is going to be sitting out for fear of getting something wrong. If you simply bid your cardboard chips, then worst case scenario is you are wrong and lose nothing.

Now that I've covered the "wits" and the "wagers", it's time to cover the cons. My first con in the game is that it feels a bit too short. Seven questions doesn't really seem like enough to me. However, extending the game would normally just result in the players who were winning gaining even more bonus chips since the game really stacks success on success (unless you bet it all on a wrong answer). However, whenever I have played the game, we have fixed this problem by playing about 3-5 games of it in a row.

The next con that I have for the game is that it seems to really be geared for 4-6 players. Yes, the box claims that you can play with up to 20 players, but with more than a certain number you have to start playing with teams - and I don't think that teams really enhance the experience here. Because of this, I can see Wits and Wagers being played at smaller parties, or parties where people really enjoy trivia, but I think that party games that focus on teams would work better with 10 or more people (such as Cranium and Taboo).

Overall, I give Wits and Wagers an 8.5/10. I will probably not get together to play this with people (hence the not quite 9.0 score), but I do anticipate that I will continue playing it and enjoying it. It is in my top 5 party games right now, and is probably my favorite trivia game of all time (which doesn't say much). If you're burned out on trivia games, but your friends really enjoy them, you definitely need to invest in a copy of Wits and Wagers! (Or for that matter, if you like party games but your party is in the 4-6 range, you should also check this one out.)

I would like to thank North Star Games for providing me with a demo copy of Wits & Wagers to review.