Designer: Chad Jensen
This game is complete, unbridled, organized chaos. And it’s fantastic.
You play as one of the major creature classifications: bird, lizard, spider, mammal, insect, amphibian. Your goal is to become the most dominant of all of them through migration, exploration, speciation,, evolution or other standard actions. Your goal is to claim as much territory as you can, adapt to new environments, and rule the world. Each turn, you will place a certain number of meeples on actions, and then those actions will be resolved one-by-one.
Interesting Mechanic: Glaciation. One of my favorite ‘take that’ mechanic in all of gaming. Dominant Species is at its core a territorial control game, and the combat for territory is fast and fierce. But does one player have too much of a lead? Well, that’s nothing that a little ice age won’t fix. Glaciation will instantly make any single piece of territory inhabitable, and played correctly may divide an enemy’s force in half. It’s the nuclear option and it won’t make you any friends, but damn if it isn’t fun.
Dominant Species is a messy, highly swingy territorial control game. I’ve seen players go down to about three cubes, and yet find a way to claw back to the top. The game isn’t without it’s problems — most of the points are scored in the final scoring, which can hide a lead. Also, scoring is minorly obtuse, as you need to use a ‘dominance’ paradigm that is somewhat mathy and needs to be constantly recalculated. But if you don’t mind these things, this is an ambitious, starkly different game that takes world domination in an entirely new direction.
(Photo Credit: The Thoughtful Gamer)
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