Bios Megafauna 2nd Edition

Over winter break, I learned how to play the second edition of Bios Megafauna. While it retains some flavor of the first edition, the second edition plays very differently. Overall, there is more to do each turn and the game seems a little more forgiving overall so you don’t get wiped out too easily. It can still happen with bad luck and bad play, but you did not get stuck on a single square which would happen occasionally in the first edition.

The second edition of Bios Megafauna was also designed to serve as a sequel to Bios Genesis. Hence, the two games share many commonalities. The mutation cards now come in the same four colors. Mutations can be promoted, and mutation cubes turned into basal organs. There is an Event card deck that simulates the changing roller-coaster climate and the possible disasters that your organisms will have to face. The climate now features three different tracks that can be manipulated due to environmental changes: oxygen level, cloud cover, and overall temperature. Green, white and black disks can be moved between the reservoir board (shown below) and the playing area.

Of the four players in the game, three of them are fauna-ish phyla and the oxygen level determines the number of actions (number in the black gear) each player can take along with the number of mutations (number in red heart chamber) each fauna-species can sustain if there was a serious mutagen-causing event. The fourth player (Player Green) is different, just like in Bios Genesis. Suitably, Green represents flora-ish phyla. In the hotter atmosphere, Green gets more actions (number in the green gear) while it’s protection against mutagens varies with cloud cover with a maximum in the middle of the reservoir.

The four players start on cratons representing separated landmasses at the beginning of the Ordovician Era: Laurentia, Baltica, Siberia, Gondwanaland. As the game proceeds, these “cratons” may move due to Event cards, and they might even collide with each other to form a larger continent. Above is a snapshot from one of my games where Siberia and Gondwanaland have crashed into each other. Players Black, White and Orange are battling for space. Each player has five “creeple” species represented by different shapes. The “blob” is the starting archetype but speciation can result in swimmers (“fish”), armored creatures (“snails”), burrowing creatures (“worms”), and flying creatures (“insect-looking flyer”). On the craton, the green disks represent forests, the black disks mountains, and the white disks ice or desert. Hexes with no disks may be weeds, swamp or sea.

Below are two player tableaux of the same game. I apologize for the quick, poorly taken, blurry pictures. (My hands shake!) Player Black representing an arthropod archetype also has speciated to a species with a horned shield and a swimmer equipped with a salt-exposed tubenose, but not much else in terms of advanced beneficial mutations. The cubes represent basal organs (blue for genes, yellow for metabolism, etc., similar to Bios Genesis). Player Green at the moment only has an archetype species but it seems quite advanced having a lure, flushing capability and bone marrow. It also has developed a primitive “anger” emotion.

The picture below shows the Laurentia craton occupied exclusively by Player Orange. The brown dice shows its latitude which can change. Above you can see several purple Event cards. The most recent significant event is a Chicxulub Class Comet that caused a crater. It also causes other environmental changes. Weeds climax into forests. There is also a deluge and mutagenic activity. The comet comes along with a Hypercapnia that causes offshore carbon to go into the atmosphere. Black disks to the right of each craton are moved back to the atmosphere reservoir and any offshore bloom (a green disk on top of a black disk) get moved to the oxygen reservoir. These are large scale climate changes! They have caused it to suddenly get much hotter on planet Earth.

The iconography takes a little getting used to. In the first game, referring to the rulebook to figure out what each icon meant was a constant. That being said, I felt the second edition rules to be streamlined. There were fewer exceptions, which is saying a lot given that Phil Eklund’s games tend to have many, many rule exceptions thanks to the idiosyncracies of evolution and the diversity we see on our wonderful planet. I was able to learn the game much faster than previous Eklund games, although it likely helped that I had played both the first edition of Bios Megafauna and Bios Genesis multiple times. It’s easier to teach, and being more forgiving of a game (you don’t keep dying), I think it will likely see more play time overall. One thing I did miss from the first edition was seeing the evolution of the different supporting flora. Much of that is gone from the second edition, but the increase in playability more than makes up for it.

In conclusion, this is a nice way to get introduced to an Eklund game if you’ve never played one. And it has creeples!

P.S. I also feel more motivated to learn High Frontier, which has been sitting in my shelf for years. (I also have the expansion.)