Dominant Species - Marine (English)

As the dominant species; only wetter!

Sixty-something million years ago – A great ice age ended. With massive global warming altering the globe, another titanic struggle for supremacy has unwittingly begun between the various animal species.

Dominant Species: Marine is a game that recreates a small piece of ancient history in an abstract way: the end of an onerous ice age and what it means for living creatures trying to adapt to the slowly changing earth.

Each player will assume the role of one of four main classes of aquatic animals: dinosaur, fish, cephalopod or crustacean. Everyone starts the game more or less in a natural state of balance with each other. But this will not last: it is indeed the “survival of the fittest”.

Through the placement of cunning action tokens, you'll attempt to thrive in as many different habitats as possible in order to claim powerful card effects. You will also want to propagate your individual species in order to earn victory points for your animal. You will be aided in these efforts by actions of speciation, migration, and adaptation, among others.

All of this eventually leads to the end of the game – the final ascent of a vast tropical ocean and its shores – where the player with the most victory points will see their animal crowned the dominant species. But someone better get dominant fast, because there's a big asteroid heading that way....

Game :

Large hexagonal tiles are used throughout the game to create an ever-expanding rendition of the main ocean on earth as it might have appeared tens of millions of years ago. Smaller Hydrothermal Vent tiles will be placed on top of some of the larger tiles throughout the game, converting them to vents in the process.

Action tokens drive the game. Each token allows a player to perform the various actions that can be taken, such as speciation, environmental change, migration, or evolution. When placed on the action screen, a pawn will immediately trigger that particular action for its own player. Dominant Species: Marine includes new "special" counters that can be acquired during the game. These special counters have improved placement capabilities compared to the "base" counters that each player starts the game with.

Typically, players will try to improve their own animal's survivability while simultaneously trying to hinder that of their opponents, hoping to collect valuable victory points along the way. The various cards will aid in these efforts, giving players useful one-time abilities, ongoing perks, or an opportunity for recurring VP gains.

Throughout the game, species cubes will be added, moved, and removed from the tiles in play ("land"). Element discs will be added and removed from animals and land.

At the end of the game, players will make a final score of each tile and mark their controlled special pawns, after which the player controlling the animal with the highest VP total will win the game.

Dominant Species Veterans:

For players of the original dominant species, this iteration introduces several key system evolutions (pun certainly intended):

• Actions are taken immediately whenever a pawn is placed instead of waiting to perform actions after all pawns are on the board. This gives players a bit more flexibility in their strategy, doesn't increase game time as more pawns are acquired by players, and reduces brain burn a bit as it eases the burden of having to plan a turn. whole in advance.

• Domination is no longer on a per-tile basis, and is no longer "competitive" with other players. In this game, you check the dominance of each element type over the entire earth, and whether or not you dominate an element type is independent of whether one or more opponents also dominate it. Dominance of an element is how you gain – and try to maintain – control of special pawns.

• Pets no longer have special abilities by default. Now players receive 3 Trait cards during setup, choosing one to keep and returning the others to the box. The chosen Trait gives its animal one of eighteen unique abilities distributed among the Trait cards.

• Acquiring special counters through domination gives the player great flexibility in planning and executing a strategy. Special pawns can "bump" an opponent's base pawn in order to take an action that would otherwise be blocked. They can be placed anywhere on the action screen (where base pawns must be placed in order from top to bottom only). There are powerful action spaces where only a special pawn can be placed. And at the end of the game, each special pawn awards its owner 13s based on their highest achieved Domination value.