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90,000 BC - A great ice age is fast approaching. Another titanic struggle for global supremacy has unwittingly commenced between the varying animal species.

Dominant Species is a game that abstractly recreates a tiny portion of ancient history: the ponderous encroachment of an ice age and what that entails for the living creatures trying to adapt to the slowly-changing earth.

Each player will assume the role of one of six major animal classes - mammal, reptile, bird, amphibian, arachnid or insect. Each begins the game more or less in a state of natural balance in relation to one another. But that won't last: It is indeed "survival of the fittest".

Through wily action pawn placement, players will strive to become dominant on as many different terrain tiles as possible in order to claim powerful card effects. Players will also want to propagate their individual species in order to earn victory points for the particular animal. Players will be aided in these endeavours via specification, migration and adaptation actions, among others.

All of this eventually leads to the end game - the final ascent of the ice age - where the player having accumulated the most victory points will have his animal crowned the Dominant Species.

But somebody better become dominant quickly, because it's getting mighty cold...

Game Contents:

22x34 inch Mounted Game Board

Full-Colour Rulebook with many examples of play

330 Wooden Cubes

60 Wooden Cones

60 Wooden Cylinders

Six Animal Displays

Seven Tile Sheets

27 Playing Cards

A Cloth Bag

Reviews Review Game

Hopuk

From

Lancs in United Kingdom

Review

Dominant Species is a gamers game in which each player is one of the species in the game, from the mammal down to the lowly insect. Now, in our world, mammals are the dominant species, but in the game world, to become dominant you have to constantly adapt to the ever changing environment as the next ice age approaches. This is done on a hex grid populated with six different terrain tiles and these are further influenced by different elements.
As the games title suggests, the game�s main concept is that of dominance. On any given tile, an animal is considered dominant when it matches more elements than any other animal present, where a match is a correspondence between an element on the animal display and elements on the tile it occupies.

Now, if at this point you\'re beginning to glaze over, have no fear!
All these interactions are cleverly handled by the Action Display. On each turn, the players place their action markers onto the display which has 12 different actions listed on it, but you can do only a few of these each turn. Then the actions are resolved from the top of the display down, with each action seamlessly flowing into the next one, until all the actions are resolved.

The game is a great deal of fun, with lots to do on each turn, but each action is a simple one, such as add an element to your display, or add a terrain tile to the board. As I\'ve said these actions flow into each other and although the action itself is simple, the repurcussions of the action can be far-reaching, such is the clever design of this wonderful game.

The rules run to 20 pages, but are well-written and easy to follow with several examples of play. A game will take an evening to complete but the experience will be constantly engaging and the evening will simply fly by.

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