SCIENCE sciencemag.org 6 MARCH 2020 • VOL 367 ISSUE 6482 1081CREDITS (TOP TO BOTTOM): GUILLAUME DUCOS; CATHERINE HAMILTON
N
orth Star Games’ new board game
Oceans simulates marine evolution,
modeling the fierce struggle for exis-
tence among competing species in an
“eat or be eaten” environment. It does
this by enabling players to create spe-
cies whose feeding strategies are dictated
by one of 12 trait cards. “Filter feeders,”
for example, forage exclusively from the
fish tokens in the game’s reef zone. “Apex
predators,” on the other hand, must suc-
cessfully attack other players’ species. Play-
ers can react with defensive behaviors, such
as “inking” and “schooling,” which, in turn,
create pressure on other players to pro-
duce predators with ever-stronger attacks,
in a coevolutionary arms race. The food
tokens a player earns from feeding attempts
are added to the individual board of each
species and are eventually converted into
the final points that determine victory at
the game’s conclusion.Oceans is the latest addition to the highly
praised North Star Games Evolution series
( 1 – 3 ). Veterans of the earlier games in that
series will recognize Catherine Hamilton’s
mesmerizing illustrations on the box and
on the game’s main (“surface”) deck of
cards. Her vibrant watercolors
simultaneously capture the el-
egance of real species’ forms
while leaving room for players’
imaginations to complete the
canvas of their new creations.
The “deep” deck, however,
which comprises 89 unique
abilities, includes designs from
other talented artists, lend-
ing to their distinctive feel.
The game preserves one of the
key elements of its predecessors,
illustrating trade-offs associated
with certain feeding strategies.
Food tokens are limited, and either play-
ers must keep the reef well stocked, or spe-
cies that feed from the reef must eventually
adapt to life in deeper habitats. But Oceans
really ups the ante when it comes to species
and player interactions.
The game cleverly incorporates a host of
traits that create symbiotic relationshipsbetween and among players’ species. For
instance, “parasitic” creatures leech food to-
kens from adjacent species, whereas “shark
cleaners” gain tokens when a large attack
has been made. A single feeding event can
trigger a cascade of effects among a spe-
cies’s symbionts, highlighting the intercon-
nectedness of life in such ecosystems and
illustrating the vital role of keystone spe-
cies. Abrupt changes to these species send
reverberations across the community and
spell extinction for those that cannot evolve
fast enough. Players are also discouraged
from allowing their species to indulge in
unbridled feeding frenzies: Those that gain
too many fish tokens overpopulate, and
their numbers collapse by half.
Every game of Oceans features an event
known as the Cambrian Explosion, named
for the period in Earth’s history characterized
by rapid speciation rates and a burst of mor-
phological innovation. Here, players use dou-
ble the amount of trait cards per turn, thus
hastening the evolutionary turnover of traits.
This second half of the game also requires
species to consume more food per round to
survive, intensifying the game’s tempo.
While it is possible to play the game using
only the 12 surface trait cards, the game gets
really weird (in a good way) if players choose
to add in the cards from the deep deck after
the Cambrian Explosion. This deck features
powerful and mysterious cards that lean into
science fiction and embrace the unknown
lurking in our thalassic depths, as deep-
sea krakens, leviathans, and behemoths
rear their heads. It also features a range of
real, magnificent, and game-changing traits
found in the deep sea, such as
intelligence, bioluminescence,
and coprophagia (yes, the game
goes there). It is worth not-
ing that gentle giants can also
evolve with great success, lest
it seem as though the game is
biased toward aggressive strate-
gies at this phase.
Oceans invites players to mar-
vel at the rich diversity of ocean
life, from the vivacious reef to
the mysterious ocean depths.
Building on the prior successes
of the series, it packages all this
into a fast-paced and dynamic strategy game
with high replay value. jREFERENCES AND NOTES- S. West, Nature 528 , 192 (2015).
- A. Chuang, Science 355 , 587 (2017).
- M. R. Muell et al., Evolution 10.1111/evo.13924 (2020).
10.1126/science.aba9172Increasingly powerful beasts emerge
from Oceans’ deeper waters.(^1) Department of Psychology and Department of Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville,
TN 37996, USA.^2 New Mexico Consortium, Los Alamos, NM
87544, USA. Email: [email protected]
Oceans
Nick Bentley,
Dominic Crapuchettes,
Ben Goldman, and
Brian O’Neill
North Star Games, 2020.
EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
An underwater arms race drives a vibrant new game
By Angela Chuang^1 and^ Orlando Schwery^2
Evolution makes a splash
BOOKS et al.
Published by AAAS