After chasing it around town, I finally found a copy of the new "gateway" addition to the Evolution Game System and the Theme: Evolutionfamily of board games: Evolution: The Beginning, designed by <PERSON> published by NorthStar Game Studio. This game is being released in the U.S. exclusively at the Target chain of department stores and is currently priced at $25. (I've heard rumor that the exclusivity is only through the end of the 2016 calendar year [or possibly until August 2017], but that's far from confirmed fact.)
My wife and I have played one game, so this isn't a full review. I'm fairly well versed in Evolution, though. I play the base game and it's two expansions regularly and have worked as demo staff at the North Star Games booth at Essen (and the upcoming Gen Con 2016). While this isn't going to be a full review, I would like to start with a mini-review of what this game is, what purpose it serves in the Evolution Game System, and the major differences in the gameplay between Evolution: The Beginningand Evolution.
What is Evolution: The Beginning?
(You can safely skip this portion if you're familiar with how Evolution plays. You can find all of the major mechanical differences below in "What are the differences from the Base Game?")
At the beginning of the game, Evolution: The Beginning casts the players as something like a universal common ancestor of all amniotes in the primal wilds of an Earth-like planet. There's a common watering hole that all of the players send their species down to for food during their turn. The goal of the game is to guide your species through eating the most food and being the most plentiful.
It's all fine and good when everyone is eating a measly two food every turn. But this is a game of the survival (and victory) of the fittest, so you're given all the tools that you need to develop traits that feed your growing population more efficiently, find food more easily or store it in their fat stores, prey on other species around the watering hole, and develop defenses against those predators.
The player aid is two sided. Side One.
On every turn of Evolution: The Beginning, you'll perform 4 steps:
1) Gather
2) Adapt
3) Eat
4) Score
For Gathering, there are three steps. 697
First, you'll add two food tokens from the game's supply (referred to as the Excess Food). Second, you'll grab a card off of the top of the deck and place it in front of you, face down, to represent a new little urweasel or prelizard or protochicken. Third, you draw three cards.
The Adapt step is where most of the game's thinking happens. You can perform any number of four different actions as many times and in any order as long as you want to or can. Those four actions are:
1) Create a New Species: lay a card down in front of you, face down, as a new species
2) Add Population: lay a card down in front of you, face down, splayed on top of an existing species. Each new card is a +1 to the species total population.
3) Add Traits: play cards face up onto your species to give them abilities. A species can only ever have three traits at one time and a species cannot have duplicate trait cards.
4) Remove Traits: you're freely allowed to remove traits from your species at any time during the Adapt step, but most of the time you'll do it to adapt a species to the ecosystem on the table by adding a new Trait that gives your species a needed defense or new strategy for feeding.
After you've used your hand of cards to create and (re)configure your species, it's time to Eat. Eating has two main actions:
Non-Carnivores: Take food tokens from the Watering Hole and place them in the little circular Food spots on the backs of the stack of cards that represent the species. If there are four cards splayed on top of each other, you'll try to collect four tokens to place on those cards. Once every Food spot on every population card in a species is filled, the species is considered Fed .
Carnivores: Carnivores are cut off from the salad bar at the Watering Hole. They're stuck catching their dinner on the hoof. All Carnivores must look around the table and identify any species they're able to attack.
1) Their owner then chooses one to eat. 403