Ursuppe: Amoebae in the Primordial Soup

This past winter break I have been revisiting older boardgames in my collection. Maybe it’s the scientist in me, but I have amassed a decent set of evolution-themed boardgames. I’ve always been interested in puzzles and games, but I only started growing my collection in the late 1990s when introduced to games coming out of Germany. These combine strategy, luck, shorter rule-books, and shorter playing times compared to the “wargame” beasts of yesteryear.  One of the early games I acquired, back when you could still find really good deals on eBay (now crowded by commercial sellers), harks back to the beginning of life on Earth. That game is Ursuppe by Doris & Frank.

Ursuppe was published in 1997, twenty years ago. It was re-released for the English-speaking market as Primordial Soup in 2004. I have the older German version, with English rules included. Since this was a used copy, the owner had already assembled the amoebae, requiring the hammering of a stick into a wooden base. One amoeba was cracked by this process but the owner had glued it back together and even provided a new replacement in case I did not like the glue job (which was fine). I’m glad I didn’t have to assemble the amoebae myself. Those were the days when games had some assembly required!

I looked back at my games log and was shocked to see that between 2003 and 2006, I had only played five games of Ursuppe, and that it hadn’t been played in the last ten years! I did play it more often prior to 2003 (before logging plays) when I had a smaller collection of games. But as the collection grew, god but older games got less love – a rather sad situation. My goal is to try and remedy that situation by bringing out some old favourites. So without further ado, here’s what Ursuppe is about accompanied by a couple of pictures from my one game (so far) in January 2017.

In Ursuppe, each player manages a family of amoebae*. The goal is to grow the family both in numbers and in evolutionary traits. Each turn, players score points for the number of amoebae they have on the board and how many evolutionary traits their family possesses. Players start the game with two amoebae in the soup. Each “sector” of soup also contains two food cubes of each colour (red, blue, yellow, green). A game turn has six phases; the first is “Movement and Feeding”. An amoeba may drift in the soup or attempt to move against the drift. The direction of drift changes each turn according to the environment card in the middle of the board. To move an amoeba against the drift, a player must pay one biological point (BP), rolls a die, and moves in the direction indicated. (Rolling a six allows the player to choose the direction.)

A key part of the game is keeping your amoebae alive. They must eat to survive. After movement or drift, each of your amoebae eats one food cube of every other colour, and then “poops” two food cubes of its own colour. So if you are the blue family, your amoebae eat red, yellow and green cubes, while pooping blue cubes. (One amoeba’s poop is another’s food!) Thus, the distribution of food cubes changes as the game progresses leading to all sorts of different strategies to stay alive and possibly even thrive! Amoebae unable to feed suffer damage. (A grey sphere is threaded through the stick.) After two damage points, an amoeba dies. Unless it has the evolutionary trait Life Expectancy, in which case it only dies after accumulating three damage points. The picture above shows the game board after several turns. You can see the different distributions of food in each sector, and several of the amoebae have taken one grey damage sphere. When amoebae die, they are converted to food cubes of each colour thus replenishing the food supply.

Biological Points (BPs) are the currency of the game. Among other things, they can be used to attempt active moments in the soup, to acquire new evolutionary traits, and to increase your family size by binary fission! The picture below shows the blue player with three evolutionary traits: Spores, Struggle for Survival, and Intelligence. The cost of each card is indicated under Price. The number in the square (Mutation Points) indicates how susceptible these traits are to mutation due to ultraviolet damage from the environment. In this example, the Environment card indicates the number 8. The blue player has 4+4+3 = 11. During the Environment phase, the player can choose to either lose one of these traits (so that the mutation point total is 8 or below) or pay 3 BPs to make up the difference between 8 and 11. Thus, it becomes costly to accumulate too many evolutionary traits, and these are gained and lost as players try to adapt to the changing situation. Their amoebae evolve!

Let’s take a look at what the cards do. As the blue player, Spores allows me to place a new amoeba anywhere on the board not already occupied by one of my own amoeba in the Cell Division phase. Otherwise, I would have to place it in a sector adjacent to one that has an existing blue amoeba. Chances are there isn’t much remaining food of the needed colours near my other amoeba; that’s why Spores is useful. Struggle for Survival allows my amoeba that is unable to eat the needed food the opportunity to chomp on another amoeba in the same sector. It costs one BP to make an attack. It is successful unless the other player’s amoeba has Escape, Defense or Armour evolutionary traits. Intelligence is “completely useless” as these are amoebae and it makes for a fun joke. However it is the cheapest card, and having evolutionary traits increases your victory points acquired each turn!

There are many other fun and interesting traits and the cards interact well with one another and with the changing environment. There is a UV protection trait that reduces the sum of mutation points on your cards so you can have more of them. A Tentacle trait allows you to pull food cubes as your amoeba moves or drifts. A Movement card allows you to roll two dice instead of one when moving against the drift (you choose one of the dice as your final movement). Frugality allows you to eat one colour less but one cube more at Feeding time. Defense allows you to fend off an attacker in a struggle for survival. In Ursuppe, the cards are double-sided. The side with English text is black and white, but if you read German, the other side is coloured! There are no other language-dependent components. (In the Environment card, east is the letter “O” for “Osten”, the German word for East. The other directions have the same first letter: N, W, S)

A full game of Ursuppe typically takes 1.5–2 hours. The game accommodates three or four players, but not two. There is an expansion allowing up to six players, and also features new gene cards, but I have no plans to acquire it. In this day and age, it is no longer as easy to find other folks willing to spend more than two hours to play a boardgame (and the expansion will almost surely extend the playing time). I personally enjoy playing Ursuppe, both for the theme and because the game is fluid (pun-intended) with the ever-changing environment and the evolution of traits. Twenty years ago, when the choice of games was more limited, this would have been played more often. But today there are many games streamlined to play in the sweet spot of 40-60 minutes, while still containing a good dose of strategy and luck, and able to accommodate 2-5 players. This limits Ursuppe to a niche crowd.

Ursuppe is easy to learn and fun to play, in my opinion, but it simply takes more time, and there can be a bit of analysis-paralysis for new players trying to choose what new evolutionary traits to acquire. The 2014 game Evolution allows for 2-6 players, plays in half the time, and does a great job simulating evolution and adaptation. If one were hosting a boardgame night, Evolution would probably be picked over Ursuppe the majority of the time. (I will feature Evolution in a future post.) At the other end of things, Bios Genesis is fantastic thematically but takes a good 3-4 hours and much more patience to learn a set of complex rules. Shorter and more streamlined games often have to sacrifice some thematic elements for streamlined game-play (and rules explanation). Evolution is essentially a card game. You don’t move creatures around to eat food and/or other creatures; unlike in Ursuppe where you have the tactile feel of moving wooden pieces on a game board. (Many of the games from that era coming out of Germany, Settlers of Catan being the most widely known example.)

I’m not sure when I will play Ursuppe again, but I’m glad I was able to revisit it and be reminded of why I like the game and why it will likely stay in my collection even with limited play. Primordial Soup!

*Technically, the first organisms that would demonstrate what we think of as “alive” would be prokaryotes, bacteria or archaea. The amoeba is a eukaryote, significantly more complex than a prokaryote. But since the game refers to “amoeba” that’s what I will call them in this post.